Future AI will choose its own pricing.

Todays AI broadly either gets billed per word (token), or on a fixed monthly subscription cost (plus some usage limit per day/week/month).

Better (smarter) models cost more.

Humans also have a similar billing system - typically humans are paid by the hour, or on a yearly salary. Better/smarter humans are usually paid more.

But the smartest humans don’t bill hourly. I can’t hire Bill Gates or Elon Musk for an hour to work on my problem.

Instead, people like Bill Gates do business deals. Those deals typically are of the form “Me and my friends (company) will do XYZ task for you, in return for $Y”. Y is determined by negotiation, but typically has elements of the cost of the labour and materials to do the task, the value the task gives to the receiver, the difficulty of finding someone else willing and able to do the task, etc.

I predict that in the future, the smartest AI’s won’t be available by the token/subscription either. Instead, they will offer to do work for you and make an offer for the work they have done, based on how much it would cost to have the work done another way.

I built you this tool, you are making $200k/year from it. I want at least $20k/year, else I won’t do more work for you.