The demand is there. They were never thinking they would be netflix and sell everyone a sub. Their messaging the whole time is "AI will put everyone out of work" which is a business dog-whistle for "replace all your workers with AI". That is happening. Every white collar business across the country is genuinely trying their hardest to teach their employees to use AI and anything that is once offloaded to AI is forever being done with AI. That's recurring demand for these companies. Nothing ordinary users do with AI is really comparable to this. Most people either just use it for searching, which every search engine is providing for free, or the occasional user who is abusing the subscription and maxing it, but never going over and turning on API billing.

Consumers don't matter. It's mainly a producer good and that's ok. Many valuable industries are. Crude oil is not anything any consumer has ever bought and yet it keeps many large countries afloat and wealthy.