this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2026
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I'm sorry, did everybody else not see this coming from miles away? This is the private equity playbook.
When something is too good to be true, you ALWAYS have to be ready to either jump ship, massively change how you do things, or pay through the nose.
The unique thing about GitHub Copilot (and all the other vibe-coding tools) is that they're speed-running the playbook because this shit is not profitable. It can't be. Their costs scale up with usage, unlike every other business that can take advantage of economies of scale, so they've skipped the slow, steady enshittification phase and jumped directly into the "squeeze blood from this stone to keep the scam going a little longer" phase.
Plain inference is profitable actually, that's why there are a hundred inference providers on OpenRouter who compete by undercutting each other. The labs however aren't profitable because training the models is a huge drain.
As others have pointed out, the compute cost of inference is only one small part of the puzzle. All the frontier model providers - which OpenRouter gives you access to - are massively raising their prices in desperate bids to recoup the cost of model generation in the first place.
There's really no hiding from the token apocalypse unless you're running a model on your own hardware.
But they can only do that because others are doing traning, no? There's no point at which you can go "okay it's all inference from here", the model needs to be updated with new information/guardrails/context to continue being useful for most use cases
In a vacuum maybe but are they profitable if you add the infrastructure investments to the mix? What about model development? There was a shit ton of money that was spent. Covering the running costs is not enough. At some point someone has to pay for the investments.
Didn't deepseek train their model for $6m?