These companies have to keep training because that's their moat, hyping the next big model is only thing keeping the market from asking the real questions about growth capability.
The world where OpenAI stops training because it's too expensive is a world where everyone else has given up even earlier.
With the commodification in this space, I don't see how that ever happens. The allure of free, local AI that competes with SOTA is enticing to all of the same people that are currently willing to pay for it. With governments wanting to take stakes in these companies and fears of widespread job loss, there's always going to be energy to pry these tools away from the few who currently control them.
Whether they succeed is a different question, but the pressure to keep improving will not stop anytime soon and will continue to force frontier labs to keep throwing money into the furnace. And for as long as that remains true, excluding training costs from expenses is disingenuous.
