[strken]

It's more like you have a business making engines, each generation of engine has eventually turned out to be profitable over its lifespan, but each generation has an exponentially increasing R&D cost and your customers will switch from the old engines to a competitor if they don't like the newest generation.

You're stuck racing against your competitors with the distinct possibility that your R&D costs will outgrow the market demand, and you can't stop because otherwise your customers will stop investing in your dead end tech and switch.

[jcgrillo]

And there are just tons of free engines sitting around that are basically almost as good as the newest ones...

[tenuousemphasis]

Except this is the first generation of engine manufacturers and nobody knows if it will actually be profitable yet.

[strken]

We do know that Anthropic claims earlier models eventually turned a profit, and OpenAI is presumably the same.

What is in doubt is whether past performance is an indicator of future results. How long will the ever-increasing R&D expenditure keep paying off?