[bandrami]

Nope. They're losing money on straight inference (you may be thinking of the interview where Dario described a hypothetical company that was positive margin). The only way they can make it look like they're making money on inference is by calling the ongoing reinforcement training of the currently-served model a capital rather than operational expense, which is both absurd and will absolutely not work for an IPO.

[wild_egg]

Inference, in and of itself, can't be completely unprofitable. Unless you're purely talking about Anthropic?

But

> If you want LLMs to continue to be offered we have to get to a point where the providers are taking in more money than they are spending hosting them

Suggests you just mean in general, as a category, every provider is taking a loss. That seems implausible. Every provider on OpenRouter is giving away inference at a loss? For what purpose?

[bandrami]

For the same reason that Amazon operated at a loss for two decades and Uber operated at a loss for a decade and a half. The problem is the free money hose isn't running anymore.

[dgellow]

Do you have sources? I would be interested to read them

[bandrami]

Probably the best roundup is Ed Zitron at https://wheresyoured.at

Half the articles are paywalled but the free ones outline the financial situation of the SOTA providers and he has receipts

[victorbjorklund]

I really doubt that since prices are even higher than no-name hosts on open router etc charges.