AI labs see inference revenue as a means of persuading investors to fund training of the next, larger and better model.

“The way the labs see the world,”

“the whole point of inference revenue is to help convince investors to give you more money.”

“in order to train the next bigger better model and if you're spending most of your compute on inference and you're basically declaring that AI progress has stalled and you're just now in the business of being a cloud provider now this is a less compelling business than building AGI and so the labs do not want to be in this business nor do they think they're in this world they think that within a year they'll have built models that make the current ones look extremely shitty but they need to invest”