The indication that OpenAI's inference is profitable is that 3rd party providers host large models for cheaper.

Given that OpenAI is ahead in intelligence, it's also reasonably likely that they are at the frontier of efficiency too.

Your "evidence" for OpenAI's inference not being profitable is apparently based on leaked financials supposedly showing growing losses for reasons entirely unknown.

With their research, training, data centers, chip development, and hardware product development, there seem to be a number of reasons that might explain growing losses.

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itishappy a day ago | parent [-]

> Given that OpenAI is ahead in intelligence, it's also reasonably likely that they are at the frontier of efficiency too.

Frontier labs have no incentive to be at the frontier of efficiency.

Claude still leads the pack in general intelligence yet has the worst efficiency by far.

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user43928 19 hours ago | parent [-]

They have an incentive to make their models efficient enough to serve demand and make a profit on it.

The incentive that is missing is passing on efficiency improvements as price savings to customers, when your model is still in demand because of its higher intelligence.

	▲	itishappy 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Agreed, efficiency is still important, but being at the "frontier of efficiency" is significantly more relevant to commodity model providers than state-of-the-art model providers. Frontier labs are incentivized to route their spend towards beating benchmarks because that's what enables them to charge a premium.