> Makes me wonder if the lowering of prices in this industry is temporary.

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.