The Era of Cheap AI Is Over

When OpenAI released ChatGPT in late 2022, it quickly broke records as the fastest growing technology product in history. AI model providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google initially used artificially low flat-rate pricing to drive adoption and capture market share, trusting that they could burn investor capital to manufacture dependency and then monetize a captive user base. But compared to the other consumer-facing platforms that had run this playbook since the 2000s, such as Facebook, Uber, or Instagram, generative AI differs in two critical respects.