There is no reason to expect capital to stop trying to squeeze labor just because inference takes the role of labor. With so much competition in the AI space, and no labor laws to protect it, why wouldn't capital drive the value of inference to the absolute bare minimum? And if the value of inference collapses to the bare minimum, who in their right mind would decide to serve inference?

Human labor has value because it is limited. If we keep up our current pace of data center buildouts and breakthroughs in model efficiency, then artificial intellectual labor will become functionally unlimited. Unlimited resources do not tend to hold their value. In that case, there are two potential outcomes: deliberate limitations on the output of artificial intellectual labor, which would require all parties involved to decide to lock themselves into their current market shares; or financial collapse of the whole ecosystem. What happens after that collapse is anyone's guess, but you have to imagine that it's the lenders who financed the whole thing who will be deciding what happens next rather than the failed tech businessmen.