[ACCount37]

As a rule: inference is very profitable, frontier R&D is the money pit.

They need the money to keep pushing the envelope and building better AIs. And the better their AIs get, the more infra they'll need to keep up with the inference demand.

GPT-4.5's issue was that it wasn't deployable at scale - unlike the more experimental reasoning models, which delivered better task-specific performance without demanding that much more compute.

Scale is inevitable though - we'll see production AIs reach the scale of GPT-4.5 pretty soon. Newer hardware like GB200 enables that kind of thing.