If you need to strawman to make a point, you're probably not making a good point.

"We're profitable on inference. If we didn't pay for training, we'd be a very profitable company." - https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/17/sam-altman/

Where exactly is my strawman? Scam Altman himself has said this, if we ignore the inconvenient parts of the business that loses all that money, they'd be super-duper profitable.

Anthropic said something similar, claiming to their investors they're profitable... If you ignore partner costs and the costs of training.

And mind you this is coming from a proven pathological liar who has a massive vested interest in over exaggerating his business' viability, so doubtless the "Very profitable" part is itself a massive lie.

Gross profitability always happens before net profitability, lol. "We've reached the first but not the second" isn't a deceptive claim, especially with the caveat in the same sentence, and it's a step that every net profitable company went through at some point in its life.

The correct quote is "If you ignore the costs that will come down in the future or stay fixed as userbase scales, then we are actually quite profitable"

Which is a basic truism of pretty much all startups, and nothing noteworthy or insightful to point out.

Why would you expect training costs to come down in the future? It seems to me that the labs themselves have concluded they can't stop training due to competition, which is why they're now asking the government to step in and shut down their competitors.

> or stay fixed as userbase scales

This sentiment aged extremely poorly with Anthropic's S1 now released. Turns out the "vibes" guys were right! I expect the goalpost will shift to claims that the S1 is fabricated in a larger than Enron fraud involving both the auditors and Anthropic.

You mean the S-1 docs where they state they're operating at a GAAP of -4% (even then that's based on their best 28 days multiplied by 13), meaning losing money? You sure showed the plebs with the impressive billions of dollars of loss!

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2130357/000162828026...

Operating cash flow of $3,929M and $482M of CapEx gives $3,447M of Free Cash Flow in H1 2026

I believe it was Eric Schmidt at Google who once famously said "revenue solves all known problems" in an all hands

There's a reason he didn't say profit...

Not saying I agree with the sentiment, just noteworthy and perhaps something to reflect upon while judging behaviors aligned with this perspective.