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This is thoroughly debunked at this point. The frontier labs are profitable on the tokens they serve. They are negative when you bake in the training costs for the next generation.

Yes, I have often paid more than that to have someone else develop a personal side project.

Compute capacity for the same workload always gets cheaper over time.

No piece of compute capacity (in the form of equipment) I have bought this year has been in any way cheaper than last year.

So what. Fluctuations over a year or two are meaningless. Do you really believe that the constant-dollar price of an LLM token will be higher in 20 years?

I can see a world where energy costs rise at a rate faster than overall inflation, or are a leading indicator. In that scenario then yes I could see LLM token costs going up.

I’ve wondered about this too.

Perhaps if we used something exotic like solid gold cookware, there might be some amazing benefits that people would love.

But it would be far from practical without being wildly subsidized…

With AI, it feels too much like the “grownups” are acting worse than the kids…