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But all the open-weight players make money right now. Google (Gemma), Alibaba (Qwen), z.ai (GLM), minimax.io (Minimax) - they all have hosted offers and sometimes closed-weight max versions.

And the fact that the open-weight as well as cheaper tier 2 offers exist both place a ceiling on the prices the SOTA companies can demand - and as far as we know current prices don't even fully pay for inference alone already, at least not for OpenAI.

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Are they profitable on their LLM training?

It's not clear. Z.ai is definitely not profitable.

To my knowledge none of the players is even profitable on inference, though Google probably is, considering the continuous release of papers around kv cache optimizations, mtp etc.

Your knowledge is off. Inference is highly profitable - at least for OpenAI and Anthropic.

I'd be delighted if you can link to actual numbers supporting this assumption, as all reputable reporting says OpenAI's revenue is smaller than their inference cost, e.g. https://www.ft.com/content/fce77ba4-6231-4920-9e99-693a6c38e...

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