Are OpenAI and Anthropic losing money on inference?

I feel oddly skeptical about this article; I can't specifically argue the numbers, since I have no idea, but... there are some decent open source models; they're not state of the art, but if inference is this cheap then why aren't there multiple API providers offering models at dirt cheap prices?

The only cheap-ass providers I've seen only run tiny models. Where's my cheap deepseek-R1?

Surely if its this cheap, and we're talking massive margins according to this, I should be able to get a cheap / run my own 600B param model.

Am I missing something?

It seems that reality (ie. the absence of people actually doing things this cheap) is the biggest critic of this set of calculations.

Afaik openai doesn't enforce a daily quota even on the $20 plans unless the platform is under pressure.

Since I often consume 20M token per day, one can assume many would use far more than the 1M tokens assumed in the article's calculations.