Inference, in and of itself, can't be completely unprofitable. Unless you're purely talking about Anthropic?

But

> If you want LLMs to continue to be offered we have to get to a point where the providers are taking in more money than they are spending hosting them

Suggests you just mean in general, as a category, every provider is taking a loss. That seems implausible. Every provider on OpenRouter is giving away inference at a loss? For what purpose?

For the same reason that Amazon operated at a loss for two decades and Uber operated at a loss for a decade and a half. The problem is the free money hose isn't running anymore.