Gen-AI is an empowering technology for the masses and easy to run locally. And the providers are in a race to the bottom on pricing.
OpenAI is charging a _really_ high monthly fee for ChatGPT, and it’s quite popular. It’s very limited - there’s no way the cost incurred for usage is near that. Obviously their costs include the R&D that has already happened, but I still think it’s priced way over that.
Drug manufacturers are famously making money hand over fist. Patients aren’t their customers. Insurance companies are. They are surely gouging insurance companies to their fullest capacity.
And big LLM providers will certainly try, but they have competition now, all 3 tied up at roughly the same level. And then there is competition from open models that can handle 50% of what big models do.
So they can only set a high price for very advanced/critical tasks, where usage will be much lower.
(Whether they should be able to hike drug prices by 100% overnight or sell drugs with insane markups is a separate question.)