I doubt inference costs will scale up significantly, but even if they do, it simply strengthens the strategic case for Apple's focus on local inference.

Inference costs wont increase but inference prices have to go up dramatically.

Investors are expecting trillions of dollars to come out of this play. That's only possible through monopoly pricing essentially.

"Being a profitable business", which selling tokens could absolutely be, is not sufficient. They need to own a large chunk of the world