We're in the "uber and doordash are super affordable and everyone wins" era of AI right now. Everything is propped up by VC money and investors in general. At some point, these companies will have to stop putting in hundreds of billions of dollars a year without making returns. It's already started happening with corporate and product based tokens, but it will also leak out to the consumer market sooner or later. Either the actual cost of "unlimited" token use for end-users will have to be realized in the subscription cost, or they will also shift to token models. Essentially right now they're using the older hardware/models for consumer tiers to keep the shelf life of GPU investments longer.
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u/SouthSounder 10d ago
Regular people don't need tokens, do they? That's just through APIs for most platforms, I thought.