Why do you think big AI is going to just share all it’s ‘knowledge’?
Or did I miss the change, and ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini no longer have a free tier anymore? And then the next tier that costs peanuts for anyone in the west, that gives you more access to slightly fresher models?
The first ones are free.
And as long as they keep the weights proprietary (which all the major players are for their primary models), they can decide to charge whatever they want later.
Completely false. The price for LLM inference at a given level of model intelligence has been dropping like a rock.
There are more expensive models available, but you don't have to use them. The same LLM knowledge that was available a couple years ago is now free to download and run on your laptop.
You’re talking about companies using more tokens.
Completely different concepts. As I said, the price for a given quality of LLM output continues to decline. Has nothing to do with companies using more tokens.