These articles (of which there are many) all make the same basic accounting mistakes. You have to include all the costs associated with the model, not just inference compute. This article is like saying an apartment complex isn’t “losing money” because the monthly rents cover operating costs but ignoring the cost of the building. Most real estate developments go bust because the developers can’t pay the mortgage paym…
I think the point isn't to argue AI companies are money printers or even that they're fairly valued, it's that at least the unit economics work out. Contrast this to something like moviepass, where they were actually losing money on each subscriber. Sure, a company that requires huge capital investments that might never be paid back isn't great either, but at least it's better than moviepass.
Unit economics is mostly a manufacturing concept and the only reason it looks OK here is because of not really factoring in the cost of building the thing into the cost of the thing.
Someone might say I don’t understand “unit economics” but I’d simply argue applying a unit economics argument saying it’s good without including the cost of model training is abusing the concept of unit economics in a way that’s not realistic from a business/economics sense.
The model is what’s being sold. You can’t just sell “inference” as a thing with no model. Thats just selling compute, which should be high margin. The article is simply affirming that by saying yes when you’re just selling compute in micro-chunks that’s a decent margin business which is a nice analysis but not surprising.