Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but: 1) They are investing Loony Toons levels of money and using Loony Toons financing a lot of the time for DC buildout. Those are actual physical buildings that once built out, exist and don’t need to be built again. 2) They are pointedly ignoring FPGA and ASIC. With the current model quality, would it really be so bad to burn Claude irrevocably on a chip and have a non-modifiable, cheap to mass produce, order…
Inference is probably the cheapest part of it all. The buildings will last for years, decades even, but the GPUs need to be replaced every 2-3 years in perpetuity.
But it’s not like the models we have now would stop to exist if training stopped. Other than the occasional retraining to get the latest data in, if they stopped wanton experimentation with models, that admittedly is pushing the models forward, the training costs could plummet and inference would be the thing to optimize and scale.