I keep looking at the openrouter token charts and its exponential growth. Month on month they out out more and more tokens and critically the quality of those tokens keeps increasing as well. The charts are led entirely by the chinese open weight models like deepseek v4.1 flash and Z.AI's GLM-5.3 with Claude and GPT down in 6th and 7th place.

So while I think a number of these companies are never getting their training costs back AI as a thing is growing really fast right now, in the space of a year openrouter has 100x their token creation.