[barrell]

> It’s very plausible (and increasingly likely) that OpenAI/Anthropic are profitable on a per-token marginal basis

Can you provide some numbers/sources please? Any reporting I’ve seen shows that frontier labs are spending ~2x on inference than they are making.

Also making the same query on a smaller provider (aka mistral) will cost the same amount as on a larger provider (aka gpt-5-mini) despite the query taking 10-100x longer on OpenAI.

I can only imagine that is OpenAI subsidizing the spend. GPUs cost by the second for inference. Either that or OpenAI hasn’t figured out how to scale but I find that much less likely