[winter_blue]

> They're in the "get 'em hooked" stage of the drug deal.

You're implying that people are selling inference at below cost right now. That's certainly not true for most third-party inference providers. I doubt API pricing at Anthropic or OpenAI is being solid below cost either.

The only place where you get what you're talking about are the fixed price plans OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, etc. sell.

[scuff3d]

OpenAI is claiming they'll post 74 billion in loses through 2028. Anthropic is on course to lose 3 billion by the end of this year, they lost 5 billion last year.

As far as I can tell the inference provider landscape is a fucking mess, and I can't find any decent financial information on any of the ones I tried. So unless you have something showing those companies are profitable I'm not buy it.

[Nevermark]

Their big spend isn't inference. It is the training, which they can pull back on at any time.

Inference itself will keep getting cheaper.