Sigh. None of this is surprising in the least. The cost of AI infrastructure and compute (coupled with the complexity of the chain) makes it prohibitively expensive.

It only has appeared cheap because of investor money flowing like Niagara on the off-chance that it could be made cheap enough to be profitable after getting everyone addicted to using it. I really don't think it's there, and it's definitely not cheap enough to continue flying for free much longer.