The value of tokens isn't necessarily objective and there's a bunch of factors that go into it: infrastructure costs and deprecation, the operational expenses for that and personnel, as well as a bunch of R&D for training new SOTA models that others can just distill at least partially.

The fact that they'll milk corpos that actually have money is obvious, compared to me because I'm broke, as are many other subscription users. The large AI labs don't seem to be profitable so I bet for the regular users there's plenty of subsidizing going on to at least get people to use the tech (and maybe that'd lead to some conversions at work or API usage eventually):

> OpenAI's net loss ballooned from $5 billion in 2024 to a staggering $39 billion last year, as it continued to spend heavily on AI model development and securing compute capacity, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday, citing audited financial figures confirmed by its sources.

https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/openai-fin...

Inference itself might be profitable, but is just funding the training and other stuff.