Comment by IhateAI
8 hours ago
I'm not making any guesses, I happen to know for a fact what it costs. Please go try to sell inference and compete on price. You actually have no clue what you're talking about. I knew when I sent that response I was going to get "but Kimi!"
The numbers you stated sound off ($500k capex + electricity per 3 concurrent requests?). Especially now that the frontier has moved to ultra sparse MoE architectures. I’ve also read a couple of commodity inference providers claiming that their unit economics are profitable.
Okay, so you are claiming "every single one of those 8 providers, along with all others who don't serve openrouter but are at similar price points, are subsidizing by more than 50%".
That's an incredibly bold claim that would need quite a bit of evidence, and just waving "$500k in gpus" isn't it. Especially when individuals are reporting more than enough tps at native int4 with <$80k setups, without any of the scaling benefits that commercial inference providers have.
It really is insane how far it's gone. All of the subsidization and free usage is deeply anticompetitive, and it is only a profitable decision if they can recoup all the losses. It's either a bubble and everything will crash, or within a few years once the supplier market settles, they will eventually start engaging in cartel-like behavior and ratchet up the price level to turn on the profits.