I added “indefinitely” precisely because I wanted to rule out discussion of the free credits. Those are clearly a loss-leader to get people to choose AWS and isn’t relevant to how the true cost of inference.
The point is that all of these projects are only viable when salaries are VC funded and the opex of inference is close to 0. It’s easy to say that nobody will subsidise inference if you exclude the main subsidies
Not indefinitely or for any undetermined scale, but AWS regularly subsidise up to 100k [0] in credits. It would not surprise me in the slightest if most. Inference is much cheaper than training and 100k in compute covers a decent amount of usage. Activate is tiered over 3 years so if you want to know the full story, let’s see how many of these services are still around in 18 months. I suspect just like when Games were the flavor of the month, then Crypto, we’ll see the real story when they actually have to pay a bill and their investors aren’t seeing any growth
[0] https://aws.amazon.com/activate/activate-landing/