Yes that's right. The inference costs in isolation are interesting because that speaks to the unit economics of this business: R&D / model training aside, can the service itself be scaled to operate at a profit? Because that's the only hope of all the R&D eventually paying dividends.
One thing that makes me suspect inference costs are coming down is how chatty the models have become lately, often appending encouragement to a checklist like "You can check off each item as you complete them!" Maybe I'm wrong, but I feel if inference was killing them, the responses would become more terse rather than more verbose.