You're expecting that there's going to be a supply collapse only, but there's a real risk the collapse hits both supply and demand.

A lot of the current AI business is FOMO and vanity metrics. Nobody really wants to acknowledge the support tickets where the first three responses are the customer cursing because they didn't appreciate being handed off to a chatbot, or the reworks, or the compliance/policy/privacy concerns, or the internal friction and brand damage it's causing.

Right now, a lot of that is being dazzled away by how "cheap" the alternative is, since it's built on an unsustainable cost base. It's like someone opened a "restaurant" where the food was actually supplied by making a bazillion new DoorDash accounts to claim promotional credits and having them drop the food at the "kitchen". During the initial phase, the customers will forgive that the burger was cold because it was $1.79.

Once the funny money runs out and services start shuttering or pricing for actual profitability, people are going to ask about actual quality and return on investment. There will be a demand rollback.

Even if you can do it cheaper with an open-model running on fire-sale hardware, we probably don't need 500 "chatbot listens and transcribes your meeting" services that weren't that much better than dictation software running locally on a Pentium III. We probably don't need AI-powered support experiences that manage to be worse than actually keyword-searching your company's Confluence. We probably don't need to be spinning up coding agents to spend 15 minutes discombobulating and bibblewabbling and re-reading 82 billion tokens of context before making a two-line change that an actual developer with learned experience in the code would make in 15 seconds.