[semanticist]

I don't think it really matters how much people love their product if every person using it costs them money. I'm sure people would love a company that sold US$10 bills for 25c, but it's not exactly a sustainable venture.

Will people love ChatGPT et al just as much if OpenAI have to charge what it costs them to buy and run all the GPUs? Maybe, but it's absolutely not certain.

If they "went defunct" tomorrow then the people who just invested US$6bn and lost every penny probably would not agree with your assessment that it "ended well".

[lukev]

Model training is what costs so much. I would expect OpenAI makes a profit on inference services.

[rightbyte]

Running models locally brings my beefy rig to the knees for about half a minute for each querry for smaller models. Answering querries has to be expensive too?

[dartos]

The hardware required is the same, just in different amounts.

It’s less (gross) expensive for inference, since it takes less time, but the cost of that time (per second) is the same as training.