[winternewt]

From the article:

> What is happening here is that leading AI labs are charging not only for inference but also for research in model architecture, training data collection and curation, model training cost (which can be tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars), paying their employees and recovering the marketing costs.

That's what's being subsidized.

[yreg]

You are saying it as if those costs were not necessary to provide the service.

[Paradigma11]

They are not. They are necessary for the development of future models, which does not influence the availability of the current ones. Plus you have chinese models distilling current SOTA for pennies on the dollar, so as a consumer I never will be worse off in the long (1-2 years) run.

[LUmBULtERA]

OpenAI inference revenue exceeds its cost of inference by a good margin in 2025 (https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/opena...)

[jijijijij]

Great, but that's only a part of operational costs. A craftsman's revenue may exceed the electricity bill for the power drill, doesn't mean the business is sustainable.

[LUmBULtERA]

Day 2 the craftsman has not made up for the investment/loss of their equipment. Not a useful example.

[jijijijij]

Sorry, I don't understand what you are trying to say.

[LUmBULtERA]

The craftsman, who may otherwise be profitable, also has investment costs that cause them to show a loss for some time.

[jijijijij]

Is this supposed to be some sort of gotcha? Apart from research and marketing, that's operational costs. I mean, every product could be cheaper, if you didn't have to pay for employees and means of production.