Really, I recommend reading this part of the thread while thinking about the analogy. It's great.
Competition fixes some of this, I hope Anthropic and Mistral are not far behind.
Just like employing other people!
"I can only ask my employee 20 smart things this week for $20?! And they get dumber (gpt-4o) after that? Not worth it!"
No. This may be common in freelance contracts, but is almost never the case in employment contracts, which specify a time-based compensation (usually either per hour or per month).