Electricity in the US currently hovers around 20 cents per kWh; 1 kWh gets you somewhere on the order of 1000 ChatGPT queries. So that's about 0.02 cents per query.
At the current US federal minimum wage of $7.25, that means you would need to work for about 0.1 seconds to afford the electricity bill for one query. Maybe 1 full second for one of the really hard ones.
So my serious answer to your question is, I'm pretty sure these disenfranchised groups can find room in their budget for a query or two if they think it's worth doing. In fact, they might even find ways to save more than 1 second by using that query, in which case they can produce more economic value... And so society gets richer.
I apologize for being excessively metaphorical and using "the electricity bill" to refer to the overall cost of using AI.
That said, it should be clear to you that any future pricing of AI services after the currently ongoing honeymoon period will need to recover the initial investments that have happened in the past years, pay for silicon, and make some profit too.
Actually, no, that's not clear to me either. While profit is certainly always what private enterprises aim for, it's also possible they will simply fail at it. Companies go bankrupt all the time. Those investments might simply be lost as other, better, cheaper options become available.
Nowhere should give us more confidence in this outcome being not just possible but likely, over the next 5-10 years, than the rapid growth of locally runnable models. There the fixed cost really is market rate silicon and the ongoing variable costs simply market rate electricity. So I don't even think you were being excessively metaphorical with that. That is actually where the price will head.
At the current US federal minimum wage of $7.25, that means you would need to work for about 0.1 seconds to afford the electricity bill for one query. Maybe 1 full second for one of the really hard ones.
So my serious answer to your question is, I'm pretty sure these disenfranchised groups can find room in their budget for a query or two if they think it's worth doing. In fact, they might even find ways to save more than 1 second by using that query, in which case they can produce more economic value... And so society gets richer.