They’re not contradictory positions. Inference is too expensive now to make money because the industry is immature and hasn’t yet optimized for financial success while customers don’t care much about price because they’re more concerned about not missing out.

Inference will be too cheap long term to make money because it is being commoditized and customers will start to care about results and not just be wowed by impressive technology.

And of course this technology will continue to exist but that is irrelevant to the business. OpenAI investors don’t care if LLMs exist in 10 years, they care if their investment in OpenAI has made money.