It matters because as long as they are selling inference for less than it costs to serve they have a potential path to profitability.

Training costs are fixed at whatever billions of dollars per year.

If inference is profitable they might conceivably make a profit if they can build a model that's good enough to sign up vast numbers of paying customers.

If they lose even more money on each new customer they don't have any path to profitability at all.

> If they lose even more money on each new customer they don't have any path to profitability at all.

In theory they can increase prices once the customers will be hocked up. That's how many startups works.