Thoughts on Artificial Intelligence

I had a disturbing thought recently about artificial intelligence and my usage of it. I rely a lot on AI right now, both in my day-to-day work processes and my graduate work. For my employer, I often utilize AI to answer technical questions, create SQL queries, diagnose error messages, or give me guidance on customer email correspondence. For my MBA, I use AI to grade my papers against the rubric before I submit them, I create study guides for exams based off of my notes and readings, and even treat it like a tutor to help me understand topics I want more context on. At work, I use GitHub Pro and whatever model that uses, which the company provides, and my personal usage is OpenAI ChatGPT, which I personally pay for, as well as a GitHub Pro account that I use to build out personal tech projects. I pay $30 a month for both. But, what happens if that goes up to $300 a month. What about $3000 a month? Am I being an alarmist?

All technical products at some point raise prices after customer capture. AI models require significant energy costs and technical investments to make happen. I know that AI companies are losing money on their subscriptions, and at some point will raise prices to offset it. What happens when AI is so ingrained in our lives we have no choice but to pay the extra money? There are already stories about people relying on AI for expertise they did not have before, and farming out a lot of work to AI, especially in businesses that are looking to use AI to replace headcount. I could not afford $3000 a month for AI, and I would really reconsider paying $300. So, what would this mean?

If prices go up, what would be mitigating factors to keep them down? Open-weight Chinese models? Perhaps that is why American AI companies are lobbying so hard to have those framed as threats to national security. What about more efficient tensor processors? Or nuclear powered data centers? All of these take a leap to get to, and I doubt we’ll ever get our own powerful enough hardware at the consumer level to build and run our own, especially with sky-high processor and memory prices. Is there a forthcoming “enshitification” of AI?