The doubt you are expressing was very justified until this week. But on June 1st, Microsoft changed the pricing for business and enterprise Copilot, and people started paying real money for using AI. Until that day, Github Copilot was charging users 4 cents per request (if they exceeded their subscription's monthly limit). Now, they charge at the API rate. I monitor my usage, and it's easily 10 times more expensive than the 4 cents per request before, maybe 20 or even more. And guess what? Businesses are shocked about the changes, and thinking hard what to do, but most of them will just pay 10 or 20 times or more for AI than they used to pay until now.

We will hear projections soon, in a few months, but my guess is that the big 3 (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google) will get of the order of $10 billion per month in AI inference revenues. And it will only go up from there.

> but most of them will just pay 10 or 20 times or more for AI than they used to pay until now.

At my work, after the GitHub price hike, we all got the option of 1. Keep using Github, but with the same total spend as before. i.e, use 1/20th as much since the dollar cap isn't changing. Or option 2, use as much self hosted DeepSeek v4 Pro, Qwen 3.6, Gemma4 as you want since it's almost free. (to be fair, we already had the GPUs)

If the Chinese keep releasing open weight models that are "close enough" to the big 3, I expect many orgs to make the same choice. I think we will see VPs and higher start saying "you better have a good reason for using Opus 4.8 or GPT 5.5 Pro, do you have metrics showing ${cheaper_model} isn't good enough?"

What makes you think “most of them will just pay 10 or 20 times more for AI”?

They can’t measure ROI, and it will start costing more than their staff. You might be right, but I can’t think why any competent C suit would agree to this..