[aeronaut80]

Their whole company has to be profitable, or at least not run out of money/investors. If you have no cash you can't just point to one part of your business as being profitable, given that it will quickly become hopelessly out-of-date when other models overtake it.

[vidarh]

Other models will only overtake as long as there is enough investor money or margins from inference for others to continue training bigger and bigger models.

We can see from inference costs at third party providers that the inference is profitable enough to sustain even third party providers of proprietary models that they are undoubtedly paying licensing/usage fees for, and so these models won't go away.

[sothatsit]

Yeah, that’s the whole game they’re playing. Compete until they can’t raise more and then they will start cutting costs and introducing new revenue sources like ads.

They spend money on growth and new models. At some point that will slow and then they’ll start to spend less on R&D and training. Competition means some may lose, but models will continue to be served.