> So even if a task costs $8 today thanks to VC subsidies, I can be reasonably confident that the same task will cost $8 or less without subsidies in the not-too-distant future.

The same task on the same LLM will cost $8 or less. But that's not what vendors will be selling, nor what users will be buying. They'll be buying the same task on a newer LLM. The results will be better, but the price will be higher than the same task on the original LLM.