My bet is they'll keep subsidizing for a considerable period of time, at least 1-2 decades more.

Most AI companies are just testing the waters with paid tiers right now, their greatest fear with increased pricing is folks reverting back to wikipedia, stack-overflow and other public domain organic activity buzzing back to life; that will kill any RoI potential in LLMs forever. They're playing the wait game instead, observing how the digital sphere reacts to every little increase in price.

If that weren't the case, they'd be pricing at lucrative premiums already and even gotten away in short-term considering the increased dependency in the enterprise world. But that'd be like killing for the golden egg too soon and losing all long-term potential.

Once the folks are so addicted to LLMs that even writing a hello world program sounds like a nightmare and coming up with an article draft feels like reinventing Egyptian glyphs, that's when the real pricing hammer will come.

Anthropic and OpenAI won't be around in 1-2 decades if this is their long term plan. People are not going to revert, but go elsewhere. China is proving that it can be done cheaper.

1 decade = 10 years ...