No chance unless open weight models out of China discontinue. The gap right now is practically nonexistent.

AI loses money for two reasons: (1) certain uses where owning the market is expected to be a high long-term value are currently heavily subsidized (the top-level story here is about the increasing efforts of model providers to prevent exploits where people convert subsidized services to uses outside the target of the subsidy), and (2) development costs of new models to keep up with competition.

Deepseek has demonstrated that there is no reason for it to actually lose money. The awful business practices and monopoly tactics of the frontier model labs in the US are the problem.

I mean obviously. Why would the companies that control this technology NOT charge the absolute maximum amount their customers are willing to pay?

This doesn't even have anything to do with if it loses money or not. Obviously they are going to charge as much as possible.