Why would they cut the features that they’ve already spent money to hand build?
Sure maybe the vast majority of potential users aren’t going to pay extra for every wizmo, but there definitely are smaller cohorts of premium users who are willing.
It is probably a double whammy kind of thing. Just the cost of running these things is high and if cutting a few functions or accuracy can shave some dollars off, they might take it.
The other side is that with things like language and voice models is they sort of have a Red Queen problem. They need a surprising large amount of consistent new data that is vetted just to stay in place. If there are cuts made and the quality diminishes even slightly, it become a feed back loop of lower quality.
I remember Jaron Lanier saying that about language translation. They need a consistent flow of new data otherwise the models would drift surprisingly quick as our language changed without us really noticing.
As a layman speaking out of my ass, I think it all comes down to increasing the value proposition of whatever they're championing. Right now, it's AI. How embarrassing would it be if their old voice assistants performed better than shiny, new Bard-I-mean-Gemini? Well, there's one way to ensure that that doesn't happen...
Sure maybe the vast majority of potential users aren’t going to pay extra for every wizmo, but there definitely are smaller cohorts of premium users who are willing.