> leaked financials from both OpenAI and Anthropic show unsurprisingly that they are losing billions due to R&D/scaling
No, they are losing billions because LLMs are not a viable business. Their real business is making bombastic statements which the credulous press prints unquestioning, fooling various investors and ... that's it. IPO is another of these. You really should note how the Anthropic IPO date keeps slipping because they can't make the S-1 public as it would give away the game immediately. The market was fooled by SpaceX once you can't do this a second or third time.
The existence of websites where you can rent a GPU to run open models is proof that inference is profitable.
Deepseek prices their models based on a 10 month hardware payback period. They report ~$38 revenue/GPU-hour on V4.1-Flash clusters.
Inference is clearly profitable. The question is whether it's profitable enough to justify the training research costs.