AI tools are about to suck for most of us

AI tools are something I use daily. I am not an "AI power user" but more of an "AI-tools-make-me-a-bit-more-productive" kind of person. Personally and professionally I use AI tools like Claude and Gemini regularly for personal and work-related research, drafting, and summarizing information. Questions I used to drop into Google search are now dropped into AI tools. And I use AI tools to help analyze information, draft written work, and summarize information.

All this to say, my AI tool usage pretty mundane; I'm less "AI power user" and more "AI forward." I don't see AI as a replacement for much of what I do, but rather a tool that has changed how I work, similar to change search engines brought about in the late 90s. With each passing day my workflow grows more dependent on these tools.

And that is why I am very worried about what is clearly starting to happen.

In the era of VC funding and enshittification, we should know by now that all good things eventually come to an end. And that is what's about to happen with AI tools. I can smell it.

The recent article “You’re about to feel the AI money squeeze” in The Verge sums up it up. AI companies have received historic levels of VC funding, the scale of which we have never seen before. However, their losses on the cost of operation are equally historic. These companies are not turning a profit, and therefore investors are getting a bit pissy.

AI companies have hooked a lot of people like me with free and low-cost tiers, but this just isn't sustainable given the cost of operating these tools, and this means that people like myself are about to get screwed.

The AI products are getting noticeably worse. Recently, Claude has gone wild banning accounts that, they claim, violate their terms of service (although the number of people on Reddit reporting that they did nothing to violate the TOS is growing). Users on social media regularly discuss how the latest model of whatever tool is actually worse than the previous one. I use both Claude and Gemini and the last few months have seen multiple outages, running up against usage limits with very little use, and other quality issues.

It is clear that offering relatively cheap $20/month "pro" plans is not a sustainable business model. Hell, even the "max" plans that run $100 or $200 a month probably aren't enough to make up the losses these companies are facing.

So where does this leave the average consumer? Most people can't afford a monthly AI bill equivalent to a car payment. Even some companies might soon find that enterprise solutions are unaffordable and not worth the money. Do the AI companies stop trying to out-develop one another and focus on making their current tools scalable and affordable? Unlikely.

This field is too new to know where we are headed. ChatGPT was first released in November 2022, so we are still really early in this consumer-facing AI space.