Companies are hitting their budgeted limits for AI tokens less than half way through the year and reporting that they aren’t seeing enough benefit to substantially increase that budget, and so they are scaling back use and asking people to be prudent rather than token maxxing.

In the meantime subscriptions still exist in the form of chatbots and it’s easy to exceed the inference cost of the provider by simply using your daily, weekly, and monthly limits.

The reality is that we just don’t seem to be at a point now where people are willing to pay full price for the perceived value. Perhaps we’ll get there within another generation or two of hardware and software improvements.