yes, and theres no evidence that they arent (or can't) use profitable inference to subsidise those other expenses. Some companies will keep spending massively to train better models, and some other companies will not, and offer good api prices. Which will end up being used? That depends on whether the spending turns into better value models

The fact that Anthropic models are offered at the same API pricing by not just themselves but AWS, Azure and Vertex despite Anthropic taking a major slice on licensing along with the cost an open weight 1T parameter model like K2.6 costs to run on any third-party provider, make it unlikely that API inference cost are subsidized by the labs.

Openrouter? i.e. Even excluding Deep Seek inference for very large open models is way cheaper. Maybe these providers are not very profitable but its highly unlikely that they are losing $4 for every $1 they make since selling inference is their only product...

Yes; they ban various uses of their subscriptions but say you can do whatever if you’re paying for the API without limits

Assuming this were accurate, then presumably the AI companies would be betting that inference costs come down before the bill is due - I don't see enterprises being willing to absorb another ~10x price increase for tokens (as they've just done going from subscription prices to per-token pricing)

Yeah, that's not going to work if you can get e.g. 80% of value by using 10-20x or more cheaper open models. At some point it would just make sense for large companies to rent compute and deploy their version of DeepSeek or whatever (if they don't trust Chinese providers)

None of what you said is true