Everything is currently heavily subsidized. If the AI companies don't improve efficiency, they'll eventually have to start charging what it actually costs to offer the service, which is a multiple of what the currently charge.

I expect self-hosted to be quite competitive pretty soon. Github Copilot is already wildly more expensive than it was last month. People are going from spending a few bucks to a few thousand for that same usage. So, if it doesn't get a lot more efficient (like 3x the tokens, or more, from the same infrastructure), the prices will have to go up quite a lot to keep the lights on. Everything in AI is running partly on investors money, everyone is trying to buy a monopoly and insurmountable lead and some way to lock people into a specific model and ecosystem, but so far that hasn't happened (except for people who voluntarily lock themselves into a specific ecosystem, but even in those cases, it's usually easy to get the AI to help move to another, there are no truly unique features in AI that at least one, and probably three or four, other players don't also offer).