Devils advocate here - pro and max tier customers for all the major inference providers are loss leaders from the data we have been able to figure out, and reverse engineer. They are effectively a marketing exercise.

The real profitability is selling tokens to enterprise, and enterprise demand is growing so fast that they are short on the total amount of tokens they can generate per minute, and are prioritising rationally - enterprise gets a better experience - instead of optimizing for their lowest paying (and most loss leading) customers.

We are in a hardware crunch right now but that won't be forever, and eventually (likely 2028) we will get experiences like we got in January from pro-sumer accounts again.

Not only because of cost. Mythos has only been released to some of the big tech players because it's "too dangerous" [0] for us little people.

It's easy to see this becoming a permanent position; the latest models and smarts are reserved for establishment members only, the riff-raff get the cast-offs. So the establishment is preserved and the status quo protected.

[0] I'm putting scare/irony quotes around this, but if the reporting is accurate, there is something to this; we built the internet on string and duct tape, it's not hard to see how a very smart AI could cut it to ribbons.

In periods of massive inflation, only the most wealthy survive.

But there's competition out there -- the open-source chinese models. In their current form, I assume that will turn off many people but new models -- based on those -- are likely to appear. Also, OAI and Google will release new models and pick up the lost customers.