Agreed, and the answer is pretty obvious as to how they start making profit. The answer is in this thread, CRANKING the cost up immensely once they establish agreements between the duopoly leaders in the field to do so in tandem and buy up any competition that seeks to challenge them.
I’m thinking 20x what the cost is now is where they’ll land. It’ll be a massive line item for software dev shops.
Or switch to using the way cheaper open weight models from various providers who don’t have to subsidize training costs so can just race to the bottom on inference pricing…
The quality isn’t really SOTA yet but at some point I assume they’ll be good enough (maybe already are?).
I’m thinking 20x what the cost is now is where they’ll land. It’ll be a massive line item for software dev shops.