this post was submitted on 26 May 2026
183 points (97.9% liked)
Technology
84940 readers
3578 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Building a jet doesn't require over a trillion dollars of capex, and selling jets is profitable. There's solid evidence that inference isn't profitable, and the AI labs need inference to be extremely profitable if they're going to meet their absolutely ludicrous contractual performance targets. Oracle is expecting hundreds of billions of dollars from OpenAI by like 2030. That shit is not happening.
Whether inference is profitable or not is not a global yes/no question. It depends heavily on the circumstances, what you're using it for and what you're charging for it. A lot of the money being invested in research right now is going into making inference cheaper, which would of course make it more profitable to sell at current price points. Or just run it yourself, local models are getting quite capable these days.
I wouldn't bet on any specific company being the ones to survive this, especially not first-movers like OpenAI. More likely they'll spend their money blazing the trail and the ones to profit from it will be the ones who followed along behind. When a company goes bankrupt it doesn't poof out of existence, its assets get sold off at pennies on the dollar and then whoever bought those assets gets a chance at running them without the overhead of the previous company's debt.