[gnrlst]

I have pretty much the opposite take: years from now we'll tell our grandchildren that the AI APIs we used to use were paid BY THE TOKEN!

We're in the dialup days of AI, where capabilities are in the hands of very few companies because hardware and training costs are prohibitively expensive. Sure, the apps we use are heavily subsidized by investment funding and the competition is very fierce. I'll also concede that 99% of the AI startups today will fail. But that doesn't mean only the 1% will be left: new ones will continuously enter the arena, compete for attention, and to do that they'll need to lower their prices. All the while, hardware costs will decrease, and incumbents like NVIDIA will inevitably grow stagnant and others will come to eat their lunch. It's the circle of (business) life.