M1's single-threaded CPU performance and power efficiency are exceptional; however M1's GPU performance is nothing special compared to normal discrete GPUs. You don't need something super beefy to beat M1 on the GPU side.
But also yes, it's gotta be expensive to host these models and I'm not sure where all these subsidies are coming from. I expect that we'll eventually see these things transition to more paid services.
For a low-power SoC, the GPU performance is actually pretty impressive. We recently did some transformer benchmarks and the inference performance of the M1 Max is almost half that of an RTX3090:
But also yes, it's gotta be expensive to host these models and I'm not sure where all these subsidies are coming from. I expect that we'll eventually see these things transition to more paid services.