They're substantially tied down by demand/usage right now.

How much more compute would they need to allow all of their paying users unlimited access to their best model? And to enable that setup in such a way that it's actually very fast.

The answer: they need resources far beyond what they have now. That's just to solve an existing problem.

Then throw in Sora 4 and whatever else will exist in a few years, and the need to feed that monster. They couldn't come close to allowing Sora 2 unlimited for all of their paying customers - I'd hate to see what that would require.

Then let the AI begin world building for every user (which is where this is going). It'll be decades before the resource demands actually flatten globally (at least 20-30 years, to get to global population saturation on usage; assuming the global population will begin to rapidly slow and then shrink).

Hint: the solution to Fermi's Paradox is that we go into the box and we never come back out, because it's a lot more interesting for 99.9%+ of humanity than a bunch of repeating rocks in space that take a zillion years to reach. The core purpose of AI will be to world build for us, mentally (relaxation, stimulation, entertainment, social) in we go: the end. The same thing happens to any advanced beings that get to our level, there's little to nothing out there that we can reach of interest (and no, it doesn't matter if the HN crowd disagrees, what matters for this outcome are the masses), we'll definitely figure that out, and there's infinite stimulation/experience in the machine world by contrast.