Mobile video data and tethered devices would tell a different story. Usage growth has been significant.

I expect they will be "unlimited" in the same sense the mobile / ISPs do that 99% of people never reach the limits.

We could have "unlimited" electricity too, if we choose, by printing solar panels (like the Chinese) and hopefully fusion before long.

> You can only spend so much time speaking on the phone.

Tell that to my dial up modem as I played Active Worlds in 1996.

"Unlimited" for a consumer will probably take a form like limited parallel agents at max intelligence for X amount of tokens, followed by either single threaded agents or nerfed intelligence or both.

This is the same mechanism used in unlimited mobile internet for example.

> if you get unlimited tokens, with scheduled/automated jobs and subagents you will burn a LOT of money

Maybe, maybe not. There could be a saturation point of compute demand from ordinary consumers. (See: hot-water analogy.)

Power and memory are apt to become the biggest billing constraints.

Something close to how we rent other cloud resources today makes sense. We don't worry about electricity costs, it's built into the hourly prices, use as much of the hardware as you can. Electricity rates vary over the course of the day as well.

People don't like complex pricing. This would be for businesses running larger workloads. For individuals, the unlimited plan seems the most probable to me. This stuff is going to get real cheap in the coming years.

How?

If you make it easy for lots of people to make the fuel, yes. EVs and smaller scale power generation anyone?

Yes if China somehow gets the fuel and subsidize it to sell it for cheaper in the global world, even the gulf state price will go down.

Solar panels (which continue get cheaper every year) on my house makes charging my low-TCO EV free in 5 years