We have strong indicators that inference is profitable on non-economically-valuable prompts. We don't have strong indicators that inference is profitable on economically valuable prompts.

As AI companies start extracting rent from the prompting, one of two things are going to collapse - either the long tail revenue base of low-value inference is going to collapse, because people won't be using Chat GPT to get a recipe if it costs them money or if it is ad-ridden; or the cost of economically-valuable inference is going to go up - and whether it goes up to economically stable positions is a toss-up.

And I say this as an AI enthusiast with <50% probability of a bubble burst in the short term.