[bryanlarsen]

You don't remove them willy-nilly, but evaluating companies based on their operating costs is standard accounting practice. R&D is not part of operating costs.

Capex for inference is in, capex for training is out for that analysis.

[dns_snek]

How much inference are they going to sell a year from now if they stop R&D? Any comparison excluding those costs is either misguided or fraudulent.

[bryanlarsen]

It's one of the key metrics of a business. These are growth businesses, everybody assumes they're going to have a lot more customers in the future than they have today.

If they've got X times as many customers next year than they have right now, training costs per customer gets divided by X, but inference costs per customer stay roughly constant.

So for businesses where they expect X to be large, they care about operating costs a heck of a lot more than R&D.