I don't think it is unreasonable to say both will happen, is it?

In the long term, tokens will fall in price. Obviously. (If "tokens" continues to be the unit)

In the short to medium term, for the IPOs to succeed, people have to start actually paying for what they are using, so the price will go up, and is going up, quite a lot. Once their value is set they will slowly fall from that point (or some point maybe halfway, depending on how much the market is willing to continue to subsidise).

I am an AI cynic, but I am now an informed cynic; I am learning agentic tools so I know where they are useful and I know my enemy.

I think the "fad" here is cloud-based, metered AI being a dominant work mode.

Nothing, so far, has suggested to me that any other outcome is likely than edge- to local-scale, on-device, on-laptop, on-prem models getting good enough to the point where people use them by default and use the cloud models only when they need the extra oomph.

I cannot believe that there is anything other than an enormous incentive for companies like Uber to find local, small model and on-premises solutions to their problems, not least while pricing is so changeable and people are getting nasty surprises.

Betting on OpenAI and Anthropic being around over the long term in the form that they are now, that feels like valley hopium. Utility monopolies essentially always derive from physical/geograpical limitations, don't they?