> another utility people pay to stay relevant

I'm guessing that might be so in certain professions, but I would expect the employer to pay for that. For the rest of us, it seems unlikely. At least for me, I don't have a need of a device to generate text for me. And I bet most people are are in the same boat as me.

Sonnet 4.6 is free and works really well for coding for me from just pasting `tree` and `cat` output directly in the chat window on claude.ai

Will they do it at utility / commodity prices though, or the inflated costs we see now?

That's a good question.

I think there's an assumption that current costs, which are high, will remain high.

Most of that seems to be going to model development, rather than model operation, which is the product we all use.

To me the most likely option will be, that development slows and prices rise somewhat, as they can't keep burning cash forever. But I'm willing to pay a little bit more, considering how powerful the tool is.

The free models are good enough for any work (very little) that benefits from LLMs.