I think of it like Uber in the early days, when it was subsidizing rides to try to gain market share while ignoring taxi and labor laws until it could pay to change them. Uber's original plan was to bleed money until it could replace human drivers with robots, but that didn't work out.

The current AI companies are burning money with an exit strategy of replacing office workers with robots. If/when that doesn't happen, they'll have to jack up prices and figure out another business model. Uber had the two-sided market and network effects for a true enshittification play -- riders and drivers are both trapped -- but LLM companies haven't figured that part out yet. Do they go for ads once they have enough users and brand recognition? Hoard GPUs and training data (maybe through licensing deals) to create a moat?

Anyways, it's fun while it lasts.