Just had a funny thought:

User: Please write a boilerplate function that does

LLM:

//XYZ Function: This function does the thing...
//Subscribe to Incogni to prevent your valuable personal data from ending up in the hands of Data Brokers
function XYZ () {
...

Free Version: Full of Ads

Premium Version: First adertised as Ad Free, then within a few years Full of Ads

Extreme Version: Ad Free for now, but features segregated into additional subscriptions.

Eh, it's close enough?

If they really wanted to, they could charge for "GPU time" directly. Usage gets a bit complicated with batching and context caching, but its definitely a metric that could be precisely derived.

Don't get me wrong though. That whole business model is doomed.

Whats funny is enshittifying is a suicide button when you can run deepseek or a different open weight model on your own machine. That i own. In my house. Without ads or censorship

The plan is for them to make agentic AI and charge a yearly salary per agent. They are obviously not close to that goal, or you would hear more about it.

There is applications and ways to make money. But competition isn't hard to come by and profit will be under expectations.

So my expectations is "skill-based programming" will become too expensive as a long-term solution and people who went that route will quickly become uncompetitive.

Pretty much all cloud compute is charged by usage (CPU time, storage, ingress, egress, class X api calls, etc), and is notoriously unpredictable. Businesses deal with it because, despite the unpredictability, it is cheaper than any other model could viably be offered at.

Consumer facing products will likely adopt different models; but "AI" is not a product, and most AI products will be bought by businesses.