I keep seeing articles like this that extrapolate from token pricing onto token costs. This is wrong.

Companies don’t sell their goods/services at cost. A model’s being priced at, say, $30/M for output tokens doesn’t say anything about what it costs the company to provision the 1M tokens via the model.

And no, you cannot extrapolate from any company margins that someone may have overheard in an SF coffee shop onto individual product line margins or their trajectory either. This information is usually unknowable even in most SEC filings for public companies.

It’d be great if people who wrote these articles used, say, AI to look up some basics on how a business operates. It’s really easy to do, believe me ;)