Why would these 3rd-party providers be taking losses? Together, Novita, etc... are not losing money on inference services, they are profiting. You can easily do napkin math with current & last gen Nvidia cards to calculate cost to host/serve these models. I would also doubt that any 1st-party providers like OpenAI and Anthropic lose money on per token billing. There is almost undoubtedly healthy margin being made on that.

> Why would these 3rd-party providers be taking losses?

we are in market capture phase. Domestically hosted Chinese LLMs is a descent market to capture.