Yeah but the argument people make is that when the music stops cost of inference goes through the roof.

I could imagine that when the music stops, advancement of new frontier models slows or stops, but that doesn't remove any curent capabilities.

(And to be fair the way we duplicate efforts on building new frontier models looks indeed wasteful. Tho maybe we reach a point later where progress is no longer started from scratch)

> They aren't going away but for some they may become prohibitively expensive after all the subsidies end.

Even if inference was subsidized (afaik it isn't when paying through API calls, subscription plans indeed might have losses for heavy users, but that's how any subscription model typically work, it can still be profitable overall).

Models are still improving/getting cheaper, so that seems unlikely.