This is utopian thinking. The products are way too useful to not subscribe. The argument presupposes the worst-case negative-utility in the long-term scenario (AI companies will create a totalitarian nightmare) and pits it against the radical usefulness that the products are creating right now.
I've used over a trillion tokens in the last few years with zero subscription. In fact I have one with deepseek, spend 13 cents to test some automation. The rest is consumed free of charge to bleed the bleeders.
If/when they ALL enforce paid subscriptions, I will only run inference locally. By then consumer hardware will equal frontier models in term of speed and performance.
