> Is the ROI there to pay for the trillions in commitments that have been bet on that ROI? That looks like a clear no at this point.

That's only a potential crisis for those who have made concrete investments.

On the use side, the 'cost' of AI spans more than two orders of magnitude. Looking at recent models (<6mo) with reasonable performance (intelligence index >= 45) on OpenRouter, the output cost ranges from $50/MTok (Fable) to $0.153/MTok (DeepSeek Flash 0731).

From the perspective of a user of LLM/agent assistance, there's very likely a range where the benefits outweigh the costs.

If the ROI for the model developers isn't there, then that just impairs the future trajectory of the field. Current models are just bits that aren't going anywhere, and as long as they can be served (in inference) above their marginal cost they will continue to be so-delivered.