But the reason the cost is ever increasing is the steeply ascending quality. There's no (non-doom) scenario where this game does not end with profitable cheap tokens. Wherever it'll stop scaling, it'll be profitable to serve tokens at that scale. And of course if it doesn't stop scaling, it's the singularity and all this thought of profits is quite secondary.

An industry cannot fail because it's too successful.

edit: Other explanation. The industry has found a moneyprinter. It prints money, and several companies are building them and printing money. However, each one of those companies is cashflow negative, because they're all trying their desperate best to build an even larger moneyprinter. Why? If they don't build it and the next company over does build it, and it works, then company 1 is differentially outcompeted. what's more, the more expensive each moneyprinter is, once a company gets strongly ahead the second company won't get the financing to keep up with that one. ... But it's still moneyprinters. This is not an economic race that ends up with "and thus everyone stopped printing money."

> But the reason the cost is ever increasing is the steeply ascending quality.

Sure, if you say so.

> There's no (non-doom) scenario where this game does not end with profitable cheap tokens.

I doubt it.

> Wherever it'll stop scaling, it'll be profitable to serve tokens at that scale.

It’s much more likely, imo, that local AI models will completely destroy the entire business model of inference. For any entity that would be spending enough to replace multiple employees (allegedly), the cost of the hardware to do so is completely affordable. This has the major benefit of eliminating per token costs, and practically guaranteeing that some “AI company” can’t steal your company’s secrets.

At an individual person level, this hardware will take much longer to obtain, but it will happen eventually.

> And of course if it doesn't stop scaling, it's the singularity and all this thought of profits is quite secondary.

I still believe, strongly, that LLMs are the wrong path to AGI. There’s trillions of dollars being put into turning LLMs into AGI; however, there has no zero results showing that LLMs are capable of “learning” anything. “Skills” and expanded context windows don’t count. The “model” needs to be able to modify itself, in real time, for that to be possible.

We’re in a local maxima that strongly refuses to accept that it’s a local maxima. (Diminishing returns for the amount of money poured into “training” is beyond obvious to anyone paying attention).

> An industry cannot fail because it's too successful.

Sure it can. The fossil fuel industry is wildly successful.

It’s also boiling the planet alive, but that’s okay, it’s generating shareholder value so everything’s fine.

Edit for your edit:

> edit: Other explanation. The industry has found a moneyprinter. It prints money, and several companies are building them and printing money. However, each one of those companies is cashflow negative, because they're all trying their desperate best to build an even larger moneyprinter. Why? If they don't build it and the next company over does build it, and it works, then company 1 is differentially outcompeted. what's more, the more expensive each moneyprinter is, once a company gets strongly ahead the second company won't get the financing to keep up with that one. ... But it's still moneyprinters. This is not an economic race that ends up with "and thus everyone stopped printing money."

By your own definition it is impossible to achieve profitability without an ever increasing amount of money flowing into it.

There was a business about moving stamps around that needed similar levels of cash infusion to sustain itself. Eventually its bubble popped too.