Mostly agreed, however I'm not sure about 3: I suspect it works like gym memberships, and the companies mostly make their money from people who don't use the subscriptions all that much.
Right now it's silly to default to frontier models, but it won't bankrupt your company. I believe in the short-medium term future, we'll need to be more deliberate about model choices.
In the long-term, of course, tech costs tend to plummet. Is there a future where in 15 years, my Apple Watch locally runs an Opus 4.8-class model? Maybe. And that would obviate this whole discussion.
We've already seen price hikes / token limits earlier this year, with suddenly some people running out of budget on the first day of the month. This will likely keep going for a while.
On the other hand, costs will drop too - open models and specialized hardware, as the article notes. The long question will be whether the companies will get a return on their invested billions. I don't think they will, not with the amount of competition they're facing, and I don't think any one company or model (series) has a monopoly yet. Popularity sure, but I'm confident a competitor may appear tomorrow and people will switch.
I think it's like that, but not quite. The people who have a subscription but barely use it were probably never doing any serious work with AI in the first place. I.e., why would they get a subscription when their one or two chat questions (or, "make a picture of me as a superhero" prompts) per day can be had for free?
Especially with Claude, I think people who subscribe skew very heavily towards people that can very easily make more than $20 worth of queries in a month. And then there's the not-insignificant number of people who are tokenmaxxing.
It's like the gym membership model except ten percent of members are able to spend 72 hours per day at the gym while the rest spend 8 IMO.
Likely even the E4B, which is really both fun and impressive.
That is clearly a big component of Apple's bet, anyway.
It's still more like programming than telling a chatbot to go make you GTAVI in JavaScript and make sure the graphics are as good as the original.
Maybe a safer prediction would be that most people will be fine just using hybrid agentic programs that run the models locally(probably with extra spyware). I think this is Apple's bet.