GPT-5s unit economics don't look too good

The big question is whether they also achieved positive gross margins on the newer models, and whether they can sustain them in the future. The more tokens people consume, the more likely it is that they will be price sensitive. The competition will be fierce for non-differentiated LLM tokens.

https://epoch.ai/gradient-updates/can-ai-companies-become-profitable

In short, running AI models is likely profitable in the sense of having decent gross margins. But OpenAI’s operating margin, which includes marketing and staffing, is likely negative.