Recently I watched a startup demo where they were running 500 GPT-4 queries per user session. In 2023, that would have cost them $5 per user. Today it costs them less than 50 cents. And they’re still complaining about API costs being too high.
When costs collapse, new worlds appear. This isn’t just cost-cutting. It’s a phase change.
Think about what happens when water turns to steam. At 99°C, you have hot water. At 100°C, you have an entirely different substance with different properties that can do different things.
Technology costs work the same way. There are threshold points where quantitative changes in price lead to qualitative changes in what’s possible.
AI cost inversion
A year ago, the economics of AI were clear: Features had to deliver at least $50 of value per dollar of compute cost to be worth building. That limited what companies decided to do.
Now that rule is irrelevant. In the last year, OpenAI’s token costs fell 90%. Open-source models like Llama, Mist
We współpracy z: https://fortune.com/2025/04/04/ai-cost-collapse-tech-startups/
