[sfifs]

> We're still in the "$5 airport Uber" era of LLMs. They're heavily subsidized, and everyone still complains about costs.

This is nonsense that AI providers want to peddle. Inference is wildly gross margin profitable - likely 90%+ gross margins. It's very easy to work out the cost structures bottoms up. All providers can drop costs to a third and still keep positive gross margins.

The problems are 1. It possibly still doesn't pay out on training investment in a reasonable time frame without a massive expansion of the 90% gross margin.

2. There is no moat. As we see Mac Mini & High End GPUs stock outs and the pricing offered by DeepSeek and Qwen, the performance of Open Weight models are good enough that people can and are already shifting many inference workloads out of these 90% margin players