> AI costs aren't going to stay this high

Why do you feel this way? Are you talking about frontier models from US companies or smaller weight open source models?

From the perspective of US companies, it seems pretty clear they're severely under water and will need some way to become profitable or risk collapse, so how else will they do that or they than jacking up prices or some unknown future miracle advancement?

I could see the argument applied to self-hosted/OSS models tho.

so how else will they do that

By selling more tokens, which by all reasonable accounts are profitable on the margin.