If you completely ignore inference revenue needing to offset training costs. Is inference still profitable if you account for the amortized training cost?
There are a bunch of companies who offer inference against open weight models trained by other people. They get to skip the training costs.
This is what people mean when they say margin. When you buy a pair of shoes, the margin is price/(materials+labor), and doesn’t include the price of the factory or the store they were bought in