[lambda]

You're leaving out their training costs. And while you might say "well, once they're trained you don't have to spend more on that", but as we've seen they have to keep training new models on new data, such as current events and new language features and APIs. And some aspects of that training are becoming more costly, or more scarce, as companies like Reddit and Stackoverflow restrict and sell their data, less data gets produced on Stackoverflow as people switch to using LLMs instead, website operators go to more extreme measures to block AI scrapers that ignore robots.txt, etc.

Yeah, people tout RAG and fine tuning, but lots of people just use the base chat model, if it doesn't keep up to date on new data, it falls behind. How much are these companies spending just keeping up with the Joneses?