The flatrate pricing models seem unsustainable. But API pricing at the big 3 AI providers is more expensive than per-token pricing for hosted versions of comparable open source models (for models that have an equivalent). And those hosters have no reason to run at a loss. So in terms of pure compute cost of running the LLM, API pricing should be pretty profitable. They just spend a lot of money advancing the state of the art. More than they can make back at the current market size, hence all the posturing about AI becoming ubiquitous and taking over all work