How would that help with pricing? The cost of hardware is already subsidized to hell and back by investors and that's not dropping costs enough. I'm not concerned about Uber, they are way to big. I'm thinking sub 1000 employees in total and maybe 50 - 100 people in the IT department. Are they just going to be cut off from AI tools, because the cost of running them would ruin the company?

I do think your prediction makes sense, because the AI really isn't the product, it needs to be baked into something and licensing the models saves you the R&D and cost of implementing your own.