DeepSeek on GPUs is like 5x cheaper then GPT

And TPUs are like 5x cheaper then GPUs, per token

Inference is very much profitable

OpenAI hasn't released their training cost numbers but DeepSeek has, and there's dozens of companies offering inference hosting of open weight models for the very large models that keep up with OpenAI and Anthropic, so we can see what market rates are shaking out to be for companies that have even less economies of scale. You can also make some extrapolations from AWS Bedrock pricing and can also investigate inference costs yourself on local hardware. Then look at quality measures of quantizations that hosting providers do and you get a feel for what hosting providers are doing to manage costs.

We can't pinpoint the exact dollar amount OpenAI categorically spends but we can make a lot of reasonable and safe guesses, and all signs points to inference hosting being a profitable venture by itself, with training profitability being less certain or being a pursuit of a winner-takes-all strategy.