It can be quite expensive to get the models and machines to do this.

That's what the money pays for when the Comment above mentions 'that you might have to eventually pay an AI company a large amount of money to ask ChatGPT such a question'

Putting aside that it won't be a large amount of money For any particular query , that's how the AI companies see themselves, not as providers of information, but as providers of mechanisms that provide information. It is not selling the Information of others, it isn't selling information at all. They are selling the service of running the mechanism.