alt Hacker News> The major providers are unprofitable after you add in the training and research costs and other overheads
The very short lives of all these models also factor in.
I think the funny thing is the more inference, the more tokens a specific version of a model spits out, actually does make it more profitable.
But somehow a lot of people truly think that each token generated increases the cost of OpenAI/Anthropic/... and shout bloody murder about "subsidies"
And I'm certain there are people out there that actually think the API prices of OpenAI and Anthropic somehow equal their electricity costs.
Nobody meets expectations of a 2 trillion dollar IPO selling a fungible commodity like tokens for old models.
And that's the rub - it doesn't matter if inference is profitable, the US labs have promised the whole kitchen sink, and taken serious investment on that pitch. They won't make it back in a cut-throat market for inference. They have to continue pitching the idea that only their models are worth using, for quality/safety/performance/etc reasons.
Which means continuing to develop and release new models. At huge expense.
Side note - while deepseek seems to be doing fine, I'll note that the emphasis on cost effectiveness is very much not a thing for the US labs right now... and it was for non-us labs. I'd be quite interested in knowing if anthropic is pulling in the same returns, or what the margin on their subscription plans actually is.
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I'm already seeing this directly at work - lots of devs still happily use claude for development, but the products we're making aren't. They'll use kimi, glm, gpt-oss, etc... basically - if cloudflare is hosting it, we're exploring it (mainly for contractual/security reasons): https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers-ai/models/.
Because we are price sensitive, and we already have to do all the work of creating very robust evaluation frameworks for our products, so we might as well choose the cheapest model that meets our standards.
whiiiiich is why we're seeing things like Haiku and gpt-luna priced down near the open models at ~.10/mm in, ~.50/mm out. They've been forced to cut prices to keep commercial customers on their cheaper models instead of moving away.
This will continue. If inference is profitable and easy, prices will continue to erode. Go browse openrouter, plenty of providers happy to undercut the competition. Bigger shops with auditing requirements will avoid them, but smaller ones won't.