alt Hacker NewsIt's because GLM 5.2 is offered on many inference providers, including providers in the US. Those companies only make their money by charging for inference, and yet they seem to be doing quite well while charging the exact same prices as Z.AI / GLM.
In fact, there's a price war where some of the US inference providers are undercutting the pricing of Z.AI's own GLM hosting. Novita & AtlasCloud are both offering 8% and 5% discounts on GLM 5.2 respectively. GMICloud is charging 30% less - but getting so hammered with demand that it only has 80% uptime & 7 tokens per second, so you get what you pay for.
You can find a list of providers & their pricing through OpenRouter here:
Sure I am not disputing that. But we can't say that z.ai is profitable because they charge the same as other providers per token. There is also training cost. And reaserch cost. Just inference is not all. Maybe there are profitable with all of it, I am not saying they are not, I do not know but at the same time I highly doubt that.
Unless somebody will find a way to actually do training by just updating weights with new data you have to train from scratch and this is very costly process.
Saying that some lab is profitable because they are profitable doing inference while disregarding training cost is not fair assessment.