The Inference Economics Nobody Modeled
Training got the headlines. Inference will rewrite the unit economics.
Most published cost discussions about AI focus on the training run. That is a mistake. Training is a one-time capital expense. Inference is an operating expense that scales with usage, and at the unit volumes the next decade is heading toward, inference is where every interesting margin question lives.
I have been collecting unit economics from operators across the stack for the last six months. The picture that emerges is, frankly, not the one most pricing pages assume.
Most pricing pages will be wrong by Q3. The companies that fix this first will own the margin.
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