They will never become profitable.

If you look at OpenAI as a single, independent, private company then they appear unprofitable. But when you look at them as a means of laundering Pentagon money and other federal contracts into straw purchases for NVIDIA and Oracle, they are immensely profitable.

AI is a Loss Leader. It props up the production and sale of hardware, which has been fruitful for its partners, its investors, and the economy as a whole. It is a digital form of induced demand in so far as new construction creates a "virtuous" cycle of increasing consumption, as more and more of the business and public sector is dragged into its orbit.

The end-game for OpenAI is to have a captured market of businesses and government institutions. Whole sectors of the economy devoid of human knowledge workers who are hopelessly addicted to AI Agent processes, because nobody managing the companies actually know what these agents are doing anymore. At this point, Altman and Amodei can charge whatever they damned well please for token traffic, because there's no bureaucracy capable of competing with them.