alt Hacker NewsI think this move will be part of a more global trend when other AI companies get publicly traded.
Because model providers have no moat, and the price of inference is quite large compared to just search, providing it for free makes no sense.
Right now, the goal of the free chatgpt and claude tiers is to accustom more people to AI, to create a new market, not to capture customers.
This strategy makes sense for start-ups with a lot of funding, but not for companies that need to be profitable. Apart from google, no large company is providing free inference to their large models in a consumer app (apart from meta maybe).
Ever checked how much Google's users actually "pay" for search? It was about 12$ per month, in 2016. It's going to be more now. Yes, really.
That's how much advertisers pay, on average, per user, and therefore how much you pay extra per month for things. Because otherwise the advertisers wouldn't have the money to buy this.