It’s way too early to tell the true cost of intelligence. Inference is still heavily subsidized, and training is apparently being funded by a mountain of free money
Balance sheets
> Are all these third party Chinese model providers subsidizing the true cost?
It could be argued the subidies are even heavier than American model providers as the price war among Chinese providers is so fierce. https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3358868/after-tri...
Third party inference providers for Chinese models are in the US and there are so many players it would be shocking they are all heavily subsidizing it.
If you’re trying to get me to argue that every seller is operating at a loss, I don’t know. But overall the market absolutely is, again because balance sheets
Plans are definitely subsidized. Inference (token consumption) has never been proven to be operating at a loss and now that you can run many of the large SOTA models from China on sparks or other clustered servers you can figure out some of the math.
Not trying to argue but just saying “balance sheets” makes zero sense.
Yes lots of capex spend, hard to say if anyone has spent too much. At the same time demand is increasing for compute.
My bet is the assumption was one company would ultimately monopolize the space and then they could jack up rates. Alas, the opposite seems to be happening.