Care to share that scrutiny?

Computers, internet, cell phones, smartphones, cameras, long distance communication, GPS, televisions, radios, refrigerators, cars, air travel, light bulbs, guns, books. Go back as far as you want and this still holds true. You think the the majority of the planet could afford any of these on day 1?

Yes, there are also high variable costs involved, so there’s also a floor to how cheap they can get today. However, hardware will continue to get cheaper and more powerful while users can still massively benefit from the current generation of LLMs. So it is possible for these products to become overall cheaper and more accessible using low-end future hardware with current generation LLMs. I think Llama 4 running on a future RTX 7060 in 2029 could be served at a pretty low cost while still providing a ton of value for most users.

The more basic assertion would be: something being expensive doesn't mean it can't be cheap later, as many popular and affordable consumer products today started out very expensive.

You can be upset that the models were trained without compensating the people who made the training data. You can also believe that AI is overhyped, and/or that we're already near the top of the LLM innovation curve and things aren't going to get much better from here.

But I've had LLMs write entire custom applications for me, with the exact feature set I need for my own personal use case. I am sure this software did not somehow exist fully formed in the training data! The system created something new, and it's something that has real value, at least to me personally!