Google AI Ultra

The global average salary is somewhere in the region of $1500.

There’s lots of people and companies out there with $250 to spend on these subscriptions per seat, but on a global scale (where Google operates), these are pretty niche markets being targeted. That doesn’t align well with the multiple trillions of dollars in increased market cap we’ve seen over the last few years at Google, Nvda, MS etc.

New technology always starts off available to the elite and then slowly makes its way down to everyone. AI is no different.

The technology itself is not useful. What they're really selling is the data it was trained on. Most of which was generated by students and the working class. So there's a unique extra layer of exploitation in these pricing models.

...I don't understand where this take keeps coming from.

You can be upset that the models were trained without compensating the people who made the training data. You can also believe that AI is overhyped, and/or that we're already near the top of the LLM innovation curve and things aren't going to get much better from here.

But I've had LLMs write entire custom applications for me, with the exact feature set I need for my own personal use case. I am sure this software did not somehow exist fully formed in the training data! The system created something new, and it's something that has real value, at least to me personally!