But the thing is that they aren't even making money; eg. OpenAI lost $11 billion in one quarter. Big LLMs are just so fantastically expensive to train and operate, and they ultimately really aren't as useful to eg businesses as they've been evangelised as so demand just hasn't picked up – plus the subscription plans are priced so low that most if not all "LLM operators" (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc) apparently actually lose money on even the most expensive ones. They'd lose all their customers if the plans actually cost as much as they should.

Apropos to that, I wonder if OpenAI et al are losing money on API plans too, or if it's just the subscriptions.

Source for the OpenAI loss figure: https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/29/microsoft_earnings_q1...

Source for OpenAI losing money on their $200/mo sub: https://fortune.com/2025/01/07/sam-altman-openai-chatgpt-pro...

To lose 11 billion means you have successfully convinced some people to give you 11 billion to lose. And money wasn't lost either. It was spent. It was used for things, making people richer and buying hardware, which also makes people richer.