I'm a big fan and user of AI but I don't see how you can say it's not subsidized. You can't just ignore the costs of training or staff or marketing or non-model software dev. The price charged for inference has to ultimately cover all those things + margin.

Also, the leaked numbers being sent to Ed Zitron suggest that even inferencing is underwater on a cost basis, at least for OpenAI. I know Anthropic claims otherwise for themselves.