> Maybe it’s the realization that it was never that cheap in the first place and they're forcing us to upgrade in a slow and painful way.
All the analysis I have seen points to frontier models being profitable to serve. It’s using 50% or more of your GPUs for research plus CapEx for capacity expansion that makes these businesses so heavily cash-negative.
What you are observing is downstream of another detail. It gets more expensive to serve a model as utilization goes down. Plus the opportunity cost vs newer, more-profitable models.
There are plenty of valid reasons to critique here. “OpenAI is lying about this being a sustainable price to serve” is not one of them.
There is really ample analysis pointing to inference not being profitable, look at anything Ed Zitron has reported.
Ed Zitron is amazing at cherry picking data to fit his thesis.