Imagine if you were the CTO of a company, massively underestimated your AWS bill, and presented your board with something enormous. Maybe something like that happened?
Or, if I wanted to speculate to the extremely negative; what if the training and operating costs ballooned to such a degree, that the deal with Microsoft was an attempt to plug the cash hole without having to go to the board requesting an enormous loan? Because the fact that Copilot (edit: previously known as Bing Chat and Bing Image Creator) is free and ChatGPT (edit: and DALL-E 3) are not should be a red flag...
I found a tree trial and $10/month $100/year after that. I've asked them to consider a free tier for hobbyists that cannot justify the expense but I'm not holding my breath.
If there is a free tier I did not find, please point me to it!