> I have not see any reporting or evidence at all that Anthropic or OpenAI is able to make money on inference yet.

Anthropic planning an IPO this year is a broad meta-indicator that internally they believe they'll be able to reach break-even sometime next year on delivering a competitive model. Of course, their belief could turn out to be wrong but it doesn't make much sense to do an IPO if you don't think you're close. Assuming you have a choice with other options to raise private capital (which still seems true), it would be better to defer an IPO until you expect quarterly numbers to reach break-even or at least close to it.

Despite the willingness of private investment to fund hugely negative AI spend, the recently growing twitchiness of public markets around AI ecosystem stocks indicates they're already worried prices have exceeded near-term value. It doesn't seem like they're in a mood to fund oceans of dotcom-like red ink for long.