From my reading on the topic, the tokens are subsidized when considering average cost, but are profitable at marginal cost. Basically, they're super expensive when considering the training cost, but aren't super expensive when doing inference. Since AGI is quite unlikely now, my guess is that we'll see consolidation and will see frontier models released at a slower clip, such that they can pay for training for from the profits from prediction tokens themselves. There may be slight increases in token prices, but there's sufficient competition between Google, Anthropic, OpenAI and X alongside the open weights providers that I don't see huge price increases happening. Even if OpenAI is absorbed into one of the others (which I think is most likely), that would still make token price collusion difficult.

People keep saying that, but there are no real confirmed numbers. And an incredibly high incentive to lie.