I don't think they need the $20/month users when there are some who use over $1000 in tokens per day.

I know of 4 companies that are already starting to stomp down on the AI whales using the "$1000 per day". There was the cost of the entire AI usage of the company and then there was the cost of about a half-dozen people who dwarfed it individually.

So, we've established a hard upper ceiling for what AI can extract per user at roughly $100K and more realistically at $10K per year. Basically, if using the AI costs the same as a human salary, it's going to get pushback. I mean, the whole point was to get rid of those pesky human salaries, after all.

So, there are about 2 million-ish software jobs in the US? It's more than 1 million but a far cry from 10 million. So that pencils in at $20 billion in the US per year total? That means that if an AI company literally won all the US software programmers, it would be worth max $200 billion to be bought out (10x revenue).

Now how much investment have the AI companies taken? Yeah, roughly that. And investors are going to want quite a bit more than that back.

Even if they had zero delivery costs, the AI companies are cooked long term. The moment your number bumps into "All the X in the US/World", you've got a problem.

Short term? Greater fool theory applies. And there appear to be a lot of them.

And all this is before we start getting into people exploring the open models. Most people were like me; we started on something like Claude and just stayed put because it was straightforward. Now that we've been kicked, we'll start looking at the other options.