My guess is two things: 1. Economies of scale. Cloud providers are using clusters in the tens of thousands of GPUs. I think they are able to run inference much

My guess is two things: 1. Economies of scale. Cloud providers are using clusters in the tens of thousands of GPUs. I think they are able to run inference much more efficiently than you would be able to in a single cluster just built for your needs. 2. As you mentioned, they are selling at a loss. OpenAI is hugely unprofitable, and they reportedly lose money on every query.