It seems very affordable to me as a startup. I have already coded most of the credits system. https://aidev.codes
I kind of disagree with this, I think ChatGPT is a superior system in terms of pure output. It strikes me as the sort of comparisons people make between Open Source voice recognition (which is great for a lot of stuff) vs the serverside systems (which may be more than you need, but are almost always going to produce better output). Opinion me.
> Available via API
The only way that an API gets monetized is through a subscription model or as a loss leader for other content (ads, etc...). Given that AI chat isn't a great fit for advertising (at least not without making it a lot less useful), I strongly suspect that the API model is going to get more expensive in the future.
Again, just something I suspect. Maybe it will get much cheaper to host, but the optimism people have about that is I think more of a hope than a solid expectation. There are much cheaper things to host than an AI system that don't end up being affordable to individuals and end up being primarily marketed towards businesses.
It's just not the trend that I usually see in tech, and I don't personally see a lot of differences between AI and other tech products that make me think it's going to be an exception to the general market direction that subscription services usually go.
I believe this runs client side, but whether it counts as open source is likely open for debate: