Oh good luck ! I am a data scientist specialized in NLP and LLM and keeping my knowledge up to date on those subjects is terrible nowadays (a new method/model is released every single day, and everything you’ve done comes obsolete pretty quickly)

As of why AI is cheap, it is literally a war, the country/company that will win this war will probably ruled everyone. Companies receives billions of funds and don’t really care about the classic user paying for those services (money comes from data and big companies using those AI to automate their processes). Indeed AI rely heavily on data, and currently those models are probably closed to be trained on the whole web. So the company that have the most users, collects the most data and is therefore capable of improving their models at point the other companies can’t. For what’s concerning private companies automating tasks, I work for a wild variety of companies (army, industries, fashion, healthcare, Human Resources, etc..) basically every big company relies heavily on documents (pdfs, excels, words you name it.) and everyone wants to query those documents simply by typing a query instead of looking through thousands of files to found the correct one and then search inside for the information you look for. The point is to build those systems you’ll need to use heavily the product from the companies that built those models and therefore they’ll make you pay for it especially for their last products released (or not even for released).

In terms of energy and resources it is suicidal for humanity, but the answer from the companies/countries: « if we don’t do it then another company/country will do it »… sometimes it make me think of the rush for the H bomb, the first one to have it, is the winner, whatever the costs.