subscribing to ai is in your future

It has only three years since Artificial Intelligence (AI) burst onto the scene. Now every organization selling something is touting that their products and services are powered by AI.

There is this NY Times article that covers AI in a broader context, This Is What Convinced Me OpenAI Will Run Out of Money  I do think there is an AI bubble coming in the future. Next month, this year or … in a couple of years. There is overinvestment in AI and building data centers. Over one trillion dollars are being borrowed by companies to build data centers, three trillion in total. I think there is too many people rushing in, trying to make a killing financially. Some of them will end up dead themselves.

But that is not my purpose in writing. See the quoted below from the linked article. In the end, sooner than you think, you will have to be a subscriber to use AI on a regular basis for what you want to do. Then, once you are immersed in the version of AI you have been using, you may find yourself “stuck there” in that application. This is explained briefly below. In the early days of software development everything was not just Word, there was also Word Perfect. It was what I knew, and it was easier for me to use. Then, Word started dominating, there were enterprise services, bundling of the products, Excel, PowerPoint…and Word. I had to shift.

In the AI world this is going to be more painful since AI will be learning all about “you.” Maybe I’ll live to see this happen in my lifetime…and I know most of you reading this will have to endure the changes that are surely going to impact your computer experience.

See excerpt below:

“The problem for A.I. developers is that most users aren’t paying for their services. People can choose among multiple free and excellent models; unless they have especially complex and compute-intensive queries, they have little reason to subscribe to the premium versions. If a model maker imposes a paywall or displays irritating ads, customers will migrate elsewhere.

This lack of stickiness is most likely temporary, however. At some point in the not-so-distant future, a model will probably know its user so well that it will be painful to switch to a different one. It will remember every detail of conversations going back years; it will understand shopping habits, movie tastes, emotional hangups, professional aspirations. When that happens, abandoning a model might feel like a divorce — doable, but unpleasant.

At this point, the A.I. builders would turn profitable. As well as charging for subscriptions [Eric’s emphasis] and running ads, they could sell shopping services, home entertainment, wearable devices, tax preparation. For hundreds of millions of people, A.I. companions might be the primary gateway to an internet rendered far more useful and compelling than it is today. How long will it take for these companies to reach the promised land, and can they survive in the meantime? Until fairly recently, investors hardly asked that question. They blithely assumed that capital markets would bridge the gap between the emergence of a great technology and eventual profits. After all, most of today’s tech giants spent years operating at a loss before they earned hundreds of billions.”

One last note, Open AI does not expect to become profitable until 2030 and they are spending billions each year.