[lazide]

Sure - but is there any doubt in that example that gas stations are making a profit?

And unlike gasoline, once models are trained there is no significant ongoing production cost.

[otterley]

Models aren't static. In order for them to remain relevant, they have to be constantly retrained with new data. Plus there's a model arms race going on and which will probably continue for the foreseeable future.

[lazide]

Fair point - though various distilling and retraining tricks do reduce the cost quite a bit. It’s not like everyone is doing all the work they had to do from scratch, every time.