The profit comes when you're so addicted you will pay whatever to continue using it and they increase the cost to use. Alternatively, they contract with governments to forward all the personal information you're voluntarily feeding into these models to them. Sora cost an astronomical amount because of the amount of compute required to make a video feel smooth, the other models aren't quite so dire.
As much as I'd love to see all these companies crash and burn, I don't really expect that to be the case. OpenAI and Anthropic are both investing big in building their own datacenters so they don't have to pay for IAAS, which will save them significant amounts on operating costs. During this time, the marginal losses are just deductions for the company anyway and they continue to build addiction. Once they have enough people hooked to change the pricing model, they'll be profitable pretty quickly.
That profit's going to come at the expense of driving up consumer hardware and electricity substantially, because they're already making deals with ***localities to buy cheap power and buying out hardware producers' stock for years in advance. It's going to suck for everyone. But, I don't think they go under anytime soon.
