That’s not how VC investments work. Just because something costs a lot to build doesn’t mean that anyone will pay for it. I’m pretty sure I haven’t worked for any startup that ever returned a profit to its investors.
I suspect you are right in that inference costs currently seem underpriced so users will get nickel-and-dinked of a while until the providers leverage a better margin per user.
Some of the players are aiming for AGI. If they hit that goal, the cost is easily worth it. The remaining players are trying to capture market share and build a moat where none currently exists.
Yes currency is very rarely at times exchanged at a loss for power but rarely not for more currency down the road.
LLMs are not AGI and everyone is starting to see it. We need new basic research for that. Think fusion reactors.
The Bing AI summary tells me that AI companies invested $202.3 billion in AI last year. Users are going to have to pay that back at some point. This is going to be even worse as a cost control situation than AWS.