> But how is that a counterpoint to tokens being subsidized? They obviously are subsidized, this just isn't arguable at all.

Why would Microsoft subsidize Anthropic's models when they serve the Claude model on Azure? They charge the same price as Anthropic. They aren't an investor in Anthropic.

There are numerous independent model serving companies that are clearly profitable serving non-Frontier models (Kimi K2.5 etc). It's easy to work out the raw costs of B200 GPUs, and then see what you need to charge for an API and see they make money.

The frontier labs charge a lot more than these companies.

The frontier labs have said they are profitable on inference.

Most people believe that training (and maybe subscriptions for some users) is where they lose money. Why do you think otherwise?

Who says it's MS subsidizing those prices and not Anthropic themselves? Just because someone rehosts a model doesn't imply they get to set whatever price levels they want.

I don't think otherwise, I just think it's meaningless to differentiate between training and inference. What the frontier labs sell is inference. They can't just exclude costs required to engage in that business unless they plan a pivot to just serving Chinese models in a commodified market.

Yes, tokens for random no-name firms serving Kimi K2 probably do make money, although even there it's unclear because so many datacenters and GPU purchases have been made on credit etc. And if we assume that's sustainable forever then you can assume training/staffing costs should be subsidized to zero and say sure, token serving is profitable in that situation. But we were discussing the top labs.