There's an interesting race happening here.

On one side, there is the usual process of figuring out how to properly use this new tech. It is to be expected that some experimentation is necessary to figure out what applications AI boosts productivity for and what applications it doesn't. There is unusually strong evangelism pushing AI into everything, so the negatives are going to be salient and may make it hard to spot some of the successes.

On the other side is something a little bit new: Deliberate enshittification. OpenAI and others no doubt saw the power crunch coming years in advance, yet it's still happening and is, ostensibly, the reason why prices are starting to go up. This was not unexpected. It's the business model. Build to the capacity that is cheaply available while offering your customers a sweetheart deal to get them addicted, and then jack up the prices when the competition has no cheap power to build upon. The result is locked in customers and locked out competition.

On one side, you have people learning when AI is appropriate and how to use it efficiently. On the other side, you have a small number of AI companies trying to extract every last bit of value so that any productivity gains wind up in their owners' pockets. Will the gains of more appropriately applying AI be entirely wiped out by enshittification?