There is no point in differentiating this like "ah it's on a bigger scale" or something. It's still just pretty basic.
Yes.
For example, Microsoft is keeping prices of Copilot temporarily free for as long as possible to destroy competitors who can't compete with the best tool available for free.
This is a known attractive tactic to the point where it is the new definition of 'Extinguish' in Microsoft's EEE strategy: Embrace (Open Source, Github), Extend (OpenAI, GitHub), Extinguish (For free).
> Are we going to see increasing prices as the hype goes away and post-nut clarity kicks in the industry?
Until there are enough AI startups shutting down and a few of them have gone public on the stock market. The prices will start to rise by $0.50 - $1.50 per million tokens very slowly.
Yes, their recent "copilot is free" tactic is obviously to crush Cursor and the like.
> Until there are enough AI startups shutting down and a few of them have gone public on the stock market. The prices will start to rise by $0.50 - $1.50 per million tokens very slowly.
At the same time, advances in GPU and inference optimizations will likely push back against price increase. That said, you're right about lock in—if that happens, then even technological progress in GPUs and inference wouldn't stop companies from raising prices.