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> It's widely understood that the big players are making profit on inference.

I love the whole “they are making money if you ignore training costs” bit. It is always great to see somebody say something like “if you look at the amount of money that they’re spending it looks bad, but if you look away it looks pretty good” like it’s the money version of a solar eclipse

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The reason it matters is that if they are making a profit on inference, then when people use their services more, it cuts their losses. They might even break even eventually and start making a profit without raising the price.

But if they're losing money on inference, they will lose more money when people use their services more. There's no way to turn that around at that price.

We don't even have any evidence inference excluding training is actually profitable.

It is called sunk cost. The marginal cost is what sets the lower limit. They will always be able to sell at the marginal cost of inference.

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