And yet they are not profitable on an ongoing basis, and aren’t even claiming to be.

The supply is currently constrained because 50+% of data center plans were cancelled as a result of the impossibility of the buildouts happening in a timely fashion, and subscriptions are charging a small fraction of the actual cost of inference, leading them to all bleed money, hence the rush to IPO to get one last infusion, since many of the past investors have publicly stated they aren’t putting any more money in until they see an ROI.

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treis 4 hours ago | parent [-]

They've stopped subscriptions for the most part. Companies are paying API rates for their employees.

	▲	boarsofcanada 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Companies are hitting their budgeted limits for AI tokens less than half way through the year and reporting that they aren’t seeing enough benefit to substantially increase that budget, and so they are scaling back use and asking people to be prudent rather than token maxxing. In the meantime subscriptions still exist in the form of chatbots and it’s easy to exceed the inference cost of the provider by simply using your daily, weekly, and monthly limits. The reality is that we just don’t seem to be at a point now where people are willing to pay full price for the perceived value. Perhaps we’ll get there within another generation or two of hardware and software improvements.