Paid users get priority access, with quotas. Free users get to are often shown a "Sorry, at capacity" type screen, that I suspect will increase through time, suggested by the fact that paid quotas are already shrinking, with ChatGPT4.
I suspect these models will usually have a "free", highly limited, option. It's the perfect bait! (worked for me)
Given how easy it is/will be to set up your own AI SaaS chatbot over time, I expect cost to consumer to trend very close to cost to provide the service. Many companies already have offerings with only a few to few dozen employees.
A few hours a year of compute seems a realistic median usage, so you can do the math. But it's not much. Certainly a premium AI that takes longer to process will cost commensurately more. But again, likely 80-20 rule applies. These more advanced AI aren't likely to be orders of magnitudes better than the cheap/common ones.
It will likely also be common to tier usage such that you only employ more expensive/computationally intensive models when needed. GPT-3.5 can already adequately cover a large number of use cases.
I don't follow. You will be able to set up a chatbot, but I can't imagine a home grown solution will ever be as useful as a private one, backed by hundreds of millions of dollars in training. They'll be increasingly, and exceedingly, incomparable, as they become more useful/profitable, as more resources are dumped in.
What path do you see that could make open models competitive?
I suspect these models will usually have a "free", highly limited, option. It's the perfect bait! (worked for me)