Video / Short
Will AI Get More Expensive? Here's the Truth
Pete Cooper answers a question he gets asked often: are consumer AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude going to get more expensive? He argues retail prices will stay roughly where they are, and explains who he thinks will end up paying the real cost instead.
Video summary
Pete Cooper opens with a question he says he is commonly asked — whether chatbots such as ChatGPT and Claude will get more expensive for everyday users. His answer is no: he expects the price to a retail customer to remain more or less the same.
His reasoning is about the business model rather than the technology. These companies are competing for your time, he says, trying to expand their brand and get you using the tools, because the more you use them the more dependent you become and the more likely you are to stay. He compares it to the Facebook and MySpace era of social media, when the priority was growth rather than revenue.
The catch, in his account, is that the cost of running the models is higher than what users currently pay. He expects that gap to be closed the way Google and Facebook closed it — through advertising. Rather than clean, well-subsidised access to AI, he predicts advertising and other barriers arriving on the front end for users to interact with.
Video transcript
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One of the questions I commonly get asked is are these chatbots going to get more expensive? You know, like ChatGPT, Claude, are they going to get more expensive? My answer is no, they're not. I think we're going to see the costs to you or the prices to you as a retail customer, someone that uses those chatbots, remain pretty much the same. Why do I say this? Because it comes to the fundamental business model. These companies are competing for your time. They're trying to expand their brand and they want to get you using these tools because the more you use them, the more you dependent on them, the more sticky they are, the more likely you are to stay with them over the longer term.
Now, we've seen this before, Facebook versus MySpace, social media. There was days where it was all about getting growth. Before Facebook had advertising, they went very hard on growth and they got that growth because people spent time on those platforms and this is just the same. But, the cost of running these models is higher than you are paying for it. So, how is it ultimately going to be paid for? Well, it's going to be the same way as Google and Facebook and the others did it, through advertising.
So, instead of having a nice clean, well-subsidized access to AI, you're going to have advertising and other barriers and things which are going to get onto your front end and you're going to see those and you're going to be interacting with those as well. I hope that helps.