to clarify, I mean that the big model companies are charging consumers much less than equivalent API pricing but they're not actually losing money so its more of a steep at-cost discount for inference. It likely does not fully cover amortized R&D just like the other reply stated but it does still cover marginal inference cost (GPU/power/etc)

Uber and Lyft were paying drivers $X but charging users way less than $X so they were literally burning investor money to get market share.

The claim is that uber and lyft lost money on each ride but that openai and anthropic make money on inference. Just not enough to pay the cost of developing the models. The difference is that uber and lyft had to change their pricing (or payment) models to make money, where anthropic or openai could just sell enough inference (at some level of sales).

It's profitable if you don't count the expenses.