[semiquaver]

There have been plenty of studies which indicate that inference considered by itself is almost certainly quite profitable at all the frontier labs. The problem is amortizing the cost of all the expensive training runs required to train new models into the revenue stream.

[pkaye]

Does that mean those running the open models are highly profitable since they don't have to do any training?

[polski-g]

Yes obviously, otherwise they wouldn't be doing it; they'd just go back to mining shitcoins.

[semiquaver]

I don’t know about highly since they have no moat even more than Antrhropic and OpenAI have no moat. Anyone with a few hundred thousand dollars or sufficient free GPUs can compete with them. So running an open model should earn a market-rate margin.