You're either overestimating the cost of inference or underestimating the cost of running a service like Facebook at that scale. Meta's cost of revenue (i.e. just running the service, not R&D, not marketing, not admin, none of that) was about $30B/year in 2024. In the leaked OpenAI financials from last year, their 2024 inference costs were 1/10th of that.

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matthewdgreen 14 hours ago | parent [-]

But their research costs are extremely high, and without a network effect that revenue is only safe until a better competitor emerges.

	▲	jsnell 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You're moving the goalposts, given the original complaint was not about research costs but about the marginal cost of serving additional users... I guess you'd be surprised to find out that Meta's R&D costs are an order of magnitude higher than OpenAI's training + research costs? ($45B in 2024, vs. about $5B for OpenAI according to the leaked financials.)