> Amazon was pretty famous for never actually posting a profit for their first ~10 years of operation
They were spending the profit from each user, not making a loss on each user.
It's a big difference.
To turn a profit all AMZN had to do was stop spending (and the consumers would not have been affected by the halting of spending).
For the AI providers, to turn a profit they have to raise the price.
It’s the same here. Inference alone is profitable. It’s the R&D cost of making a new model that drives up expenses.