Altman said months ago that they are expecting around $65/user/month from ad-supported ChatGPT. A strong hint about where they see account prices in the future.
When you run the numbers, $65/mo turns AI investment into a a 5-7 ROI, which is totally within normal bounds.
Considering there are over a billion unique weekly active users for the major labs, and demand has been relentless, it's a pretty easy sell to get investors on board.
"You pay internet, you pay phone, you pay AI".
Those numbers sound... unrealistic to me. Just doing some napkin math: 65 $/user/month / 0.01 $/ad ~= 6500 ads/user/month, which is about an ad per minute if you assume someone is using the chat interface 4 hours a day including weekends. Maybe you see that behavior from "my GF/BF is AI" types but I'm also already assuming 0.01 $/ad which is super high to my understanding (if you work in adtech please correct me if I'm wrong). I don't forsee over 50% of your workday or leisure time spent in ChatGPT as likely, especially if the ad rate is well beyond YouTube's nigh-unusable amount it is now.
There's never going to be 65$/user/month, they already struggle to move past 5% of paying users with the current pricing.