this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2026
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Plain inference is profitable actually, that's why there are a hundred inference providers on OpenRouter who compete by undercutting each other. The labs however aren't profitable because training the models is a huge drain.
But they can only do that because others are doing traning, no? There's no point at which you can go "okay it's all inference from here", the model needs to be updated with new information/guardrails/context to continue being useful for most use cases
In a vacuum maybe but are they profitable if you add the infrastructure investments to the mix? What about model development? There was a shit ton of money that was spent. Covering the running costs is not enough. At some point someone has to pay for the investments.