With coding (it's not really coding per se that matters imo it's more like dynamic logic writ large) it's a land grab strategy. They want to get established as the de facto standard and get a whole bunch of people on their platform so by the time they need to "get profitable" they have a captive audience, a leg-up on other labs. It's a tale as old as time, that's why ubers used to be cheaper than cost.

Not because there is no path to profitability (they make a ton of money on inference), they just spend a lot on R&D.

Frontier model developers don't make money, but inference providers do. For open weight models there is a healthy market of inference providers that operate profitably without VC backing.

Yes They are just pivoting to stuff that loses money more slowly but maybe has a path to profits eventually…