It's definitely true that they've increased their revenue rapidly. But at the same time the 'scaling laws' that the labs were first built around require exponentially-scaling cost (10x flops for a fixed reduction in training loss).

If anything, a better look at the economics is a reason to look forward to one of them IPO-ing. I suspect the labs probably could cut R&D and turn a profit, but that might only work for one generation, until they get superseded by the competition.

But this is exactly the problem - we have to take it on faith that inference is profitable because nobody actually knows. It’s hard to even define what that would mean, and while I am suspicious of claims that frontier lab CEOs are just out-and-out liars or bad people, defining and calculating the real cost of inference would be time- and labor-intensive in its own right and there is no strong incentive to do it other than “tech reporters are curious.” Until the IPO, we just won’t know.