Are OpenAI and Anthropic losing money on inference?

From https://www.theverge.com/command-line-newsletter/759897/sam-..., Sam Altman said:

> “If we didn’t pay for training, we’d be a very profitable company.”

Exactly. All of the claims that OpenAI is losing money on every request are wrong. OpenAI hasn’t even unlocked all of their possible revenue opportunities from the free tier such as ads (like Google search), affiliate links, and other services.

There’s also a lot of comments in this thread who want LLM companies to fail for different reasons, so they’re projecting that wish on to imagined unit economics.

I’m having flashbacks to all of the conversations about Uber and claims that it was going to collapse as soon as the investment money ran out. Then Uber gradually transitioned to profitability and the critics moved to using the same shtick on AI companies.

So inference is cheap but training is expensive and getting more expensive. It seems like if they can't get training expenses down, cheap inference won't matter.