> Did anyone really expect AI to be cheap?

Yes, a lot of people (not me). Why? Well because that was the whole value proposition of these companies, relentlessly pushed by their PR and most of the media- rememmber it was something something Pocket PhDs, massive unemployment etc?

"There's not going to be much competition to drive prices down, the barriers to entry are already huge. There'll likely to be one clear winner, becoming a near-monopoly, or maybe we'll get a duopoly at best."

Based on what exactly? So far every time OpenAI, Anthropic or whatever has released a new top performing model, competitors have caught up quickly. Open source models have greatly improved as well.

I expect AI to be just like cloud computing in general - AWS, Azure, GCP being the main providers, with dozens of smaller competitors offering similar services as well.

I do. "Commoditize your complement". Want to sell lots of silicon? Give away good local models to run on that silicon.

Even if SOTA models in the cloud are a few percentage points better, most work can be routed to local models most of the time. That leaves the cloud providers fighting over the most computationally intensive tasks. In the long term, I think models are going to be local-first.

(Unless providers can figure out a network effect that local models can't replicate).

> Did anyone really expect AI to be cheap?

Considering most of the cost of producing a model is the upfront cost rather than the running one, I kinda still do.

The point was never to produce 4 frontier models per company a year.