If you're quabbling over how much OpenAI charges for an API today that barely just launched and from which we have barely scraped the surface for applications... I don't know that seems like a failure to think broadly and assumes the market today is what it will look like in 5yrs.
There could be a ton of lucrative businesses which subsidize those operating costs. It doesn't have to be a mega-company like Google that floats it indefinitely off their ad business, or whatever other scheme. We have no idea what the value of those APIs are or if the API is the real business they (and others) are going to be relying on in the long term.
Do you have data supporting this or is it just speculation? Given we don't even know how many parameters GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 have, yet alone how efficiently they are implemented, I don't see how we can go about coming up with an accurate estimate for the cost per token.
O̶p̶e̶n̶AI.com will eventually have to raise their prices which is bad news for businesses not making enough money and still are sitting on their APIs as O̶p̶e̶n̶AI.com themselves are running up huge costs for their AI models in the cloud for inferencing.
Anthropic is just waiting to be acquired by big tech and the consolidation games will start again.