Taking SpaceX as an example, they have increased prices across all their consumer products over the past six months. But they definitely aren't short on money with Alphabet and Anthropic combined paying them over $2 billion per month.
Microsoft/GitHub lost out here as they were just repacking other people's products.
Rumors are worth squat when they’re most likely put in motion by the people with a vested interest in this industry.
Let’s talk about profits when there’s real data from the IPO documentation.
You can make some educated guesses and find out some limits on inferencing cost by looking at 3rd party providers on platforms like openrouter. You can get some median cost /tok for a given model size. Then make some educated guesses on SotA model sizes, and you can get an estimate on pure cost of serving a model. Error bars and all that, of course. But still a range, with some limits.
Also I mean prices in generally for all things are based on underlying factors, that doesn't make them arbitary (i.e. github executives using a random number generator for token pricing would be arbitary)