I imagine pretty much none of them are profitable in the real accounting sense. However, if they all turned off their free plans -- they'd be insanely profitable.

Please read their report. There is no bragging. It just tries to document performance and clarify a misconception. The concept that LLM inference may not be profitable or may be energy inefficient has been a constant song of misinformation for reasons that I dont understand. DeepSeek does indeed pretend to be of similar quality to others, but the work of their relatively small team is truly outstanding. As per a parallel thread, their result has by now been almost replicated by the sglang team. Link here: https://lmsys.org/blog/2025-05-05-large-scale-ep/