These companies are continually training new models. This is not a long term amortized cost, it's actual COGS.

Yeah, sure you can ignore the cost of purchasing the building for the restaurant for most profitability calculations, but if every year or two you were tearing down your old building and building a new one, you better believe that has to be in your profitability calculations.

I think the relevant question to define the counterfactual is what would happen if they stopped training.

If you can simply not remodel your restaurant and keep making money, then yeah, it makes sense to call it profitable.