Comment by mediaman

Just look at the prices that inference providers charge for small models. The argument that these unit economics are negative is trivial to disprove.

DeepInfra sells DS v4-flash at 0.08 in, $0.18 out. Gemma4 they sell for $0.07 in, $0.34 out. OpenAI's price for luna is $0.20 in, $1.20 out.

Why would you assume OpenAI is somehow uniquely incompetent at making small, fast models? And that they're worse at serving it than DeepInfra? Any observer can see they are making money here.

I never understand why people who are convinced there is a big con just don't check market prices and see if there's money to be made.

That doesn't mean their business is great -- they're losing tons of money, but it's because they spend too much on fixed costs, and they can't stop spending money on training next generation models with no end in sight, not because the inference is margin negative, which is a flimsy idea that just clouds the actual business issue.