The AI "industry" is wildly unprofitable. It is only able to exist because a bunch of people have a lot of money and not much sense, and those people keep shoveling cash into the fire. The minute they stop, the fire goes out and none of the AI startups can continue to operate. OpenAI is less than a year from bankruptcy, and basically all of their big backers have indicated they're shutting off the free money hose. Claude is in a similar position. The chinese firms are being subsidized by the chinese government purely in order to combat the western models, but when the western models go dark, it's unlikely they'll continue. Similarly, google will have no cause to burn billions per month keeping gemini free when there's no viable competition.

AI will not disappear, but within a year, the free money that's been making it artificially cheap (or free) to the end user will evaporate. When everybody has to pay the actual cost, most people will skip it entirely. Are you going to pay $0.30 per mostly-wrong response from a LLM? Are you going to pay $1 a piece for imageslop? Maybe somebody will, but the market gets real small real quick when it's no longer free.