Can we be sure of this? The second they tried to hike the prices to be profitable, they lost a lot of clients, or a lot of clients lowered they token expenditure. In any market margins tend to go to zero. I am using frontier models, but only because they are dirty cheap if not free. If they raise the price, I just switch to a cheaper model, start exploring the option of renting a GPU-VPS or buying my own card. Or reducing my AI usage, that currently includes stupid useless things like "translate this cooking recipe from french... for free".
> But if training becomes less costly and inference margins don't compress too much, it's a totally different story.
They are being priced as the "ifs" are certainties, and not only a possibility. If anything goes a millimetre below perfect for them, their finances collapse. High margins attract competitors, and unless you have a huge moat (and their only moat is expensive training), your high margins vanish.