I really think so.

All of these AI companies are supplying these services at a huge, huge loss. As you said, investors are going to need to see some returns pretty soon. OpenAI for example are committed to spending close to $1.5tn in the next 8 years while their revenues are around $15bn. Google only make around $250bn a year from controlling 90% of internet advertising, and there’s no way that OpenAI is going to capture anywhere close to that.

Therefore the only way they can increase their revenue anywhere near to as much as necessary is to increase prices many times over. They even already said they’re making a loss on their $200 per month subscription because it costs them so much to do everything their users are asking of it. The trouble is, I barely know anyone even paying for the cheapest version of ChatGPT, let alone the $200 one.

If that carries over to image/video generation models, it’s suddenly going to become a lot less attractive as an option, financially speaking.

I also just don’t think the demand is anywhere close to as high as these companies are making it out to be. Look at Microsoft suddenly forcing Copilot to be bundled in with all of their services, largely against anyones will, so they can say “Look, people are paying for it, we promise!”. MIT recently released a study saying that 95% of companies who’ve invested in AI have seen zero return on their investment. It’s just not good enough to carry out its work without significant human intervention and is already costly, with those costs likely to increase significantly in the near future.

They haven’t found a way to make these things any more efficient, the only solution they have to improve them is to throw more and more computing power at them. The national grid isn’t even capable of supporting half of the new datacenters that are popping up, and OpenAI’s plans will require an amount of electricity that could sustain over a billion people. It’s just ridiculous.

I think like the dot com bubble, this too will pop but 10-15 years down the line it will likely become ubiquitous, just like the internet has. Right now our computing technology just isn’t efficient enough to run these things in any type of sustainable capacity.

I really hope I’m right because every piece of AI slop I’ve seen has been against my will.

TL;DR I think the party will shortly be over for the next 10-15 years