[Someone]

> What is happening here is that leading AI labs are charging not only for inference but also for research in model architecture, training data collection and curation, model training cost (which can be tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars), paying their employees and recovering the marketing costs.

Of course they do. How else do you expect them to pay for that? If you buy a Foo from Acme, Inc, you aren’t only paying construction costs, either.

> On the other hand, once an open weight model is released, any inference provider can easily host it and just do some markup on inference cost. This proves way cheaper than running a frontier AI lab.

The only logical conclusion for commercial AI labs is to never release their models as open data, and try to stay ahead of open models. One way to do that is by having better models, another by having more users (because that decreases the per-user costs of creating the models, decreasing the price difference with companies running open models). The frontier labs are aiming for a combination of both.