Comment by m101

I think actually working out whether they are losing money is extremely difficult for current models but you can look backwards. The big uncertainties are:

1) how do you depreciate a new model? What is its useful life? (Only know this once you deprecate it)

2) how do you depreciate your hardware over the period you trained this model? Another big unknown and not known until you finally write the hardware off.

The easy thing to calculate is whether you are making money actually serving the model. And the answer is almost certainly yes they are making money from this perspective, but that’s missing a large part of the cost and is therefore wrong.