Don’t get too used to ‘subsidized’ chatbot costs

Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Company’s weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. You can sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here. The cost of AI will surely rise, along with our dependence on it Developing AI models and serving AI apps is a notoriously expensive undertaking. AI labs use massive amounts of computing power, training data, and high-priced talent to create and serve AI models, and the costs are not nearly covered by the chatbot subscription and API fees they bring in. Neither OpenAI nor Anthropic, for example, are profitable, and won’t be for some time. The difference, for now, is made up by investment money, much of it from venture capital firms. But that won’t last, of course. As AI companies mature, they’ll be expected to make returns on all the investment money they’ve taken. And the prices consumers and businesses pay for AI will almost certainly go up.  It fits the model. Silicon Valley’s canonical playboo