Prediction: micropayments are finally going to actually take off this year and next, as AIs start using tools at scale which are too expensive to serve at unlimited volumes to non-ad-watching users free of charge, but are not valuable enough per invocation to justify the overhead of using credit card rails. Whichever of the big chat companies first has “the model cannot pay $0.001 on your behalf to use a highly useful tool the other companies’ models can’t use” it’s going to add significant pressure for the other companies to start offering it too.
Prediction: micropayments are finally going to actually take off this year and next, as AIs start using tools at scale which are too expensive to serve at unlimited volumes to non-ad-watching users free of charge, but are not valuable enough per invocation to justify the overhead of using credit card rails. Whichever of the big chat companies first has “the model cannot pay $0.001 on your behalf to use a highly useful tool the other companies’ models can’t use” it’s going to add significant pressure for the other companies to start offering it too.