But explain to me how these companies will recoup these costs outside of increasing inference pricing?
Their business model is selling inference but the training and other costs have to be accounted for somehow. Unless I'm missing something obvious, inference costs must go up drastically if these companies are going to survive beyond the subsidy stage.
Sell more. The hope is that there is a huge addressable market that includes huge per-worker demand in almost all white collar work and lots of inference in people's private lives
If that doesn't work, then yes, then prices will have to go up
Both anecdotally for myself and from what I'm reading in the news, it seems just as likely that AI usage has already largely peaked.
There was a lot of hype and exploration of capabilities, but models aren't evolving fast enough to keep that going, so I'm settling down into a familiarity with what an LLM can and can't do that means I am using them less overall that I was 6 months ago when I was throwing everything under the sun at it just to see what happened.
Without either new model breakthroughs or dramatically _lower_ costs, I will be very surprised if the ultimate market doesn't end up within an order of magnitude of where it is today.