Not wishing to do a shallow dismissal here, but I always assumed AI must be profitable on inference otherwise no one would pursue it as a business given how expensive the training is.

It seems sort of like wondering if a fiber ISP is profitable per GB bandwidth. Of course it is; the expensive part is getting the fiber to all the homes. So the operations must be profitable or there is simply no business model possible.

AI right now seems more like a religious movement than a business one. It doesn't matter how much it costs (to the true believers), its about getting to AGI first.