The Inference Reckoning: From Training Buildout to Monetization

$20 per million tokens. That was the price in early 2023. Today it's $0.40. A 50x collapse. Some providers hit 1,000x when you factor in quantized open-weight models on commodity GPUs. And yet. I talked to three platform engineering leads this month. Their AI inference bills are $2M, $4.7M, and $11M per month, respectively. All three expected to spend less than $500K. All three are panicking. The math that was supposed to save them -- cheaper tokens, better models, more efficient hardware -- i