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Notes -
I don't think the math works out for that. With current pricing and a duopoly further constrained by pressure from open-weight models, the chances of Fable earning back its investment in a year are slim. It seems likely that investors did not sponsor it because they thought it would directly pay for itself, but because it is a necessary stepping stone on the way to some model which would eventually be massively profitable.
It seems quite plausible to me that Fable was expected to be profitable, and the promised multibillion-dollar capital moat to afford training compute has not held back competitors as much as expected. And Sam, at least, has to make good on his promise to buy all the RAM, cynically I'd say to keep prices high for competitors.
At some philosophical level, it seems worth noting that the real Claude Shannon was effectively "trained" with a much smaller pile of books and a couple decades of a few dozen watts. I'm not convinced training will always be so expensive.
I'm also reminded of the National Ignition Facility, which uses huge lasers for, uh, "fusion research". It was designed at a time when lasers were very inefficient, and we can do much better these days. However, it wasn't built for economical energy production (under 1% laser efficiency) and does make the pulses it needs to, so they have no reason to replace it. If it were a commercial effort for energy production, they'd have lost their shirts to smaller startups with cheap diode lasers (50%+ efficient). Sometimes moats don't work like you planned.
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