Across three AI companies where we can make estimates, compute is the dominant expense: R&D and inference compute together make up 54% to 62% of costs. Despite AI labs offering some of the highest salaries in tech, spending on staff accounts for less than 25% of total spending.
Currently, spending at each of these labs outpaces revenue by 2-3x. While Minimax and Z.ai both indicate that they will remain unprofitable for the foreseeable future, Anthropic expects to become profitable by 2028.
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We break down spending at 3 notable AI companies where data availability permits: Anthropic, Minimax, and Z.ai. Spending is categorized into R&D compute, non-R&D compute, staffing, and other, although for Anthropic we aren’t able to separate staffing expenses.
We report spending categories by the share of total operating expenses, and include non-cash expenses like stock-based compensation.
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AI company data, with data on revenue, funding, staff, and compute for many of the key players in frontier AI.
