There is a problem with these llms though which is that these companies will have to keep spending massive amounts of money on research unless they solve major issues with these models. These models are inherently depreciating assets and they depreciate almost fully within months as soon as either they or their competitors come out with a new model.

For eg. Claude was undoubtedly the best model for software devs until gemini 2.5 was released and now i see people divided with majority of them leaning towards Gemini.

And there is very little room for mistakes, as we have seen how llama became completely irrelevant in matter of months.

So while inference in itself can be profitable (again thats a big *), these companies will have to keep fighting for what it looks like decades unless one of them actually solves hallucinations and re constructs computer interfacing at a global scale!