Yes. I've always suspected inference is profitable.

But I'm also interested is retraining needed? how relevant will a model be in N years if it's just "static", and if you do need to retrain and fine-tune over time, is it still profitable? how often is that needed?

For most cases it's probably ok, often times answers are general or basically a web search anyways, but if my Agent started blasting outdated syntax it would suddenly be way worse for coding for example.

It’s helpful for a model to be somewhat static when it’s involved in business processes.

They need to be retrained often is my experience for general usage.

I have SO many cases, for example when shopping, when they make assumptions based on their cutoff date, and they need to redo everything based on lots of searches.

Sure, for many use cases old models will be useful but for general usage a model that's 5 years old will probably be garbage for most people, unless they prompt it extensively, which the general public won't do.

> But I'm also interested is retraining needed? how relevant will a model be in N years if it's just "static", and if you do need to retrain and fine-tune over time, is it still profitable? how often is that needed?

Just wait until what Ilya Sutskever has for Safe Super Intelligence (SSI) to self update the weights without retraining them to bring training costs down close to $0.