[atwrk]

But all the open-weight players make money right now. Google (Gemma), Alibaba (Qwen), z.ai (GLM), minimax.io (Minimax) - they all have hosted offers and sometimes closed-weight max versions.

And the fact that the open-weight as well as cheaper tier 2 offers exist both place a ceiling on the prices the SOTA companies can demand - and as far as we know current prices don't even fully pay for inference alone already, at least not for OpenAI.

[aurareturn]

Are they profitable on their LLM training?

It's not clear. Z.ai is definitely not profitable.

[atwrk]

To my knowledge none of the players is even profitable on inference, though Google probably is, considering the continuous release of papers around kv cache optimizations, mtp etc.

[aurareturn]

Your knowledge is off. Inference is highly profitable - at least for OpenAI and Anthropic.

[atwrk]

I'd be delighted if you can link to actual numbers supporting this assumption, as all reputable reporting says OpenAI's revenue is smaller than their inference cost, e.g. https://www.ft.com/content/fce77ba4-6231-4920-9e99-693a6c38e...