All the labs are going hard on training and new GPUs. If we ever level off, they probably will be immensely profitable. Inference is cheap, training is expensive.
To do this analysis on an hourly retail cost and an open weight model and infer anything about the situation at OpenAI or Anthropic is quite a reach.
For one (basic) thing, they buy and own their hardware, and have to size their resources for peak demand. For another, Deepseek R1 does not come close to matching claude performance in many real tasks.
All the labs are going hard on training and new GPUs. If we ever level off, they probably will be immensely profitable. Inference is cheap, training is expensive.