The same evidence could just as possibly point to supply being too great for demand. The OP article references this as a distinct possibility: if models really have gotten more compute efficient, we may wind up in a situation where we have more inference capacity than we actually need.
To give a simplistic example: if a city as a ton of available AirBnBs, you might say, "Lots of people are willing to rent out their apartments, it must be profitable for them to do so." But the fact that all of those rooms are not already booked could also mean that way too many people have attempted to rent out their apartments.
And for what it's worth, it's possible for supply to outstrip demand while still leaving inference profitable. The question is whether it's (a) profitable enough to service massive debts and (b) sustainably profitable over the long run.
Edit: to add one note, it's possible for the LABS to be profitable on inference without inference itself being profitable. We don't know what the contracts look like, but it's entirely possible that labs received sweetheart deals from neoclouds so that the latter could flaunt big utilization numbers.
If inference wasn't profitable why are consumer GPUs that are only good for running open models so expensive? Why and how would these companies sell access to open models if it wasn't profitable? You can rent your own GPU and make money if your electricity is cheap enough.
Consumer GPUs can also be used for things like gaming, remember? And they have gotten so expensive because Nvidia has sacrificed that market in order to build more datacenter GPUs.
Selling at a loss is far from unusual: Uber did it to capture a market, farmers do it to recoup at least some of their investment rather than losing all of it.
>You can rent your own GPU and make money if your electricity is cheap enough.
I would be curious to know whether you'd make more profit from the same kWh of electricity mining bitcoin versus serving inference. I know they use different hardware, but since the "inference is profitable" discussion ignores the purchase price of the GPU, let's pretend you could have opted to buy an ASIC instead.