There is no evidence that labs are losing money on inference subscriptions. The labs have massive fixed costs, but as long as inference spend is higher than the datacenters they use for inference cost all they need to do to become profitable is scale up. Right now software engineers are basically the only ones actually paying for inference, the labs just need to create coding assistants for everything that are good enough that every white collar worker in the country(world?) is paying a $1000/yr subscription. Certainly theres a lot of risk, will models become commoditized and everyone switches to open models? can they actually get non software engineers to pay for inference in mass? But its not like theres no path