Companies like OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and Meta are spending billions of dollars on specialized chips, sprawling data centers and teams of researchers racing to build ever-more-powerful AI systems. Some estimates suggest training a frontier model can cost hundreds of millions of dollars before a single user ever types a prompt.
And yet, anyone can open ChatGPT right now and start using it for free. That seems like a contradiction, if you ask me. So, if AI is so expensive, why aren't these companies charging everyone from day one?
