I agree inference probably isn’t profitable yet if you include training costs. My claim is that marginal revenue from inference is higher than marginal cost. If that’s the case then if they scale enough the training costs will be amortized.

I realize I said assuredly when I meant assumedly. My mistake. I agree it’s possible that the third party open model hosters aren’t actually profitable, my claim does rest on the opposite.

Mostly I am very skeptical on any numbers that claim these companies have a path to profitability. They raise way too much money way too often for the claim of profitability to make any sense. If inference profitable they could train new models at reasonable pace without raising tens of billions every few months. Neither they would be in a mad race for the IPO exit event.