All of the silent, hidden model routing OpenAI does strongly suggests that the unit economics are not just fine, at least not yet.

If apparently the only way you can make money with your product this early is to dilute and adulterate it behind the scenes, it strongly suggests you want the customer to continue to believe they are getting value that you can't afford to supply.

More prosaically: if either of these firms could prove that they were even really close to profitable on inference, they would have bloomin' said so while they were trying to raise more money.