Electricity is not free. If you do the math, online LLMs are much cheaper. And this is before considering capabilities/speed.
Netflix used to be $8/month for as many streams and password-shares as you wanted for a catalog that met your media consumption needs. It was a great deal back then. But then the bill came due.
Online LLM companies are positioning themselves to do the same bait-and-switch techbro BS we've seen over the last 15+ years.
Unless somehow magically you'll have the need to run 1000 different prompts at the exact same time to also benefit from it locally.
This is even without considering cloud GPUs which are much more efficient than local ones, especially from old hardware.
Because sooner or later these companies will be expected to produce eye-watering ROI to justify the risk of these moonshot investments and they won't be doing that by selling at cost.
You are effectively just buying compute with AI.
From a simple correlational extrapolation compute has only gotten more cheaper over time. Massively so actually.
From a more reasoned causal extrapolation hardware companies historically compete to bring the price of compute down. For AI this is extremely aggressive I might add. HotChips 2024 and 2025 had so much AI coverage. Nvidia is in an arms race with so many companies.
All over the last few years we have literally only ever seen AI get cheaper for the same level or better. No one is releasing worse and more expensive AI right now.
Literally just a few days ago Deepseek halved the price of V3.2.
AI expenses have grown but that's because human's are extremely cognitively greedy. We value our time far more than compute efficiency.
What happens when investors start demanding their moonshot returns?
They didn't invest trillions to provide you with a service at break-even prices for the next 20 years. They'll want to 100x their investment, how do you think they're going to do that?