But asking if average people will pay for AI is the wrong question. It's like asking if average people will pay for Salesforce or Oracle. Even if consumers don't pay for AI en masse, their employers will as the value proposition is a lot clearer.
We really don't know, in part because they're cooking all kinds of costs into R&D. My hunch is we'll recapitulate the dark fibre of the 1990s, with OpenAI et al burning capital to develop models others profit off. But that's predicated on the assumption that large models can be effectively distilled into cheap-to-run small ones. If that doesn't prove right, or the frontier keeps advancing for decades, the operating model of a high-R&D industry could resemble Intel (and semiconductors broadly) instead.
Thrifty Microsoft is upping the Office 365 Family subscription to 135 USD, throwing in CoPilot.
If you choose to cancel, then they'll give you the option of keeping the current 100 USD price for the current product without AI.
But probably everyone will adopt it - so it may not give a competitive advantage to any given company.
Also, access to market leading AI is not going to cost $20/mo when everything is said and done.
[1] https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/developmenttalk/half-global-p...