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.