> it's the running costs of these major AI services that are also astronomical

There's wildly different reports about whether the cost of just inference (not the training) is expensive or not...

Sam Altman has said “We’re profitable on inference. If we didn’t pay for training, we’d be a very profitable company.”

But a lot of folks are convinced that inference prices are currently being propped up by burning through investor capital?

I think if we look at open source model hosting then it's pretty convincing - Look at say https://openrouter.ai/z-ai/glm-4.7 . There's about 10 different random API providers that are competing on price and they'll serve GLM 4.7 tokens at around $1.50 - $2.50 per output Mtokens. (which by the way is a tenth of the cost of Opus 4.5)

I seriously doubt that all these random services that no one has ever heard of are also being propped up by investor capital. It seems more likely that $1.50 - $2.50 is the "near cost" price.

If that's the actual cost, and considering that the open source models like GLM are still pretty useful when used correctly, then it's pretty clear that AI is here to stay.