Being close to the edge of AI usage, it's important to realize that most AI use cases are not "fully autonomous AI software engineer" or "deep research into a niche topic" but way more innocuous: Improve my blog post, what's the capital of France, what are some nice tourist sites to see around my next vacation destination.
For those non-edge use cases, costs are an issue, but so are inertia and switching costs. A big reason OpenAI and ChatGPT are so huge is that it's still their go-to model for all of these non-edge use cases as it's well known, well adopted, and quite frankly very efficiently priced.
Being close to the edge of AI usage, it's important to realize that most AI use cases are not "fully autonomous AI software engineer" or "deep research into a niche topic" but way more innocuous: Improve my blog post, what's the capital of France, what are some nice tourist sites to see around my next vacation destination.
For those non-edge use cases, costs are an issue, but so are inertia and switching costs. A big reason OpenAI and ChatGPT are so huge is that it's still their go-to model for all of these non-edge use cases as it's well known, well adopted, and quite frankly very efficiently priced.