The giants knew this was coming, and soon 95% of AI tasks will be able to be done by open models (coding, research, cowork style work). So why pay a premium? Why use them at all? This leaves the labs with two options:

1) push the frontier in a way only massive scale can, and cash in on it (mythos level cyber security, recursive training, frontier science work). There’s big money for never before possible capabilities.

2) own the app layer with their edge in reputation and powered by their infrastructure. Be apple where everyone else is Linux. Do design, coding, research, SMBs, legal, finance, healthcare and more (they are doing all of this).

Will it be enough to justify a Google level valuation? We’ll see how fast they can push it.

With cache hit rates being effectively free, harnesses like Reasonix have let me do a month of work for less than 2 dollars. It's not even the subsidies making it cheap, American providers like Digital Ocean or Cloudflare host the same model with similar pricing.

It would not be surprising if GPT and Claude get cheaper too as inference gets cheaper. Two years ago, o1 was the strongest model and cost much more than Fable, while being nowhere near as smart as a Qwen 3.6 35B that you can now run on a DGX Spark without much trouble.

This is what concerns me about how AI giants are planning to make money. Their product has already been commoditized at prices which for them are still subsidized to grab market share. Unless the giants invent a technological leap, their prices are going to be dragged down by open weight models and I don't see how they'll turn a profit.

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