We're witnessing a race to the bottom on pricing as it's happening. Competition based solely or mainly on pricing is a defining characteristic of a commodity market, i.e., a market in which competing products are interchangeable, and buyers are happy to switch to the cheapest option for a given level of quality.

There's an old saying that if you're selling a commodity, "you can only be as smart as your dumbest competitor."

If we want to be more polite, we could say instead: "you can only price your service as high as your lowest-cost competitor."

It seems that a lot of capital that has been "invested" to train AI models is, ahem, unlikely ever to be recovered.