>I think everyone has known that inference is profitable overall for the major providers for a while
Have you seen any place that is not as tech-savy as HN? e.g. some Reddit subreddits?
Barely anyone is aware other than people who are already somewhat deep into this whole topic.
The insider baseball in AI is extreme I agree. I still know people who insist large language models are just glorified autocomplete.
Frontier models are still transformer based, so that's still true.
I believe they're referring to the user experience, lots of people think you just use AI to finish a sentence a la early Github copilot. The average person hasn't seen what agentic flows can achieve