Are OpenAI and Anthropic losing money on inference?

If inference is that cheap, why is not even one company profitable yet?

Because they're spending it all on training the next model.

That's an argument for why openai and anthropic shouldn't be profitable, but this point is about how also they don't have customers using the models to generate a profit either. Things like cursor, for example. ETA: also note the recent MIT study that found that 95% of LLM pilots at for-profit companies were not producing returns.

This article is about the model providers' costs, not API users'. Cursor etc have to pay the marked-up inference costs, so it's not surprising they can't make a profit.

Yes, and the comment you first replied to was about the state/viability of the industry as a whole. If users can't make money from this "transformative technology", even when the provider is in the stage of burning money for the sake of growth, that sort of tells against it turning into a trillion dollar industry or whatever the hype claims.

The point is that the providers aren't burning money by subsidising inference costs. On the contrary, if this article is to believed they're charging healthy margins on it.

So there are two answers: for the model providers, it's because they're spending it all on training the next model. For the API users, it's because they're spending it all on expensive API usage.