Quote · God Mode Podcast
Anthropic Missed a $200M Pentagon Deal by 15 Minutes | The Subscription Arbitrage Era Is Over | AI Tokens Got 850x Cheaper | OpenClaw Passes React on GitHub | EP03
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850x Token Cost Crash: From $60 to 6 Cents Per Million Tokens
At 28:10 · chapter starts 26:15
AI token costs have fallen 850 times since 2020. What cost $60 per million tokens with GPT-3 now costs 6 cents with open-source Llama 4. It's not just cheaper — the models are dramatically smarter. Every industry bottleneck unlocked by intelligence is now also being unlocked by near-zero cost.
OpenAI's frontier model price per million tokens dropped from $30 in Q1 2023 to $0.50 today; Anthropic went from $15 to $1, Google from $7 to $0.07.
Open-source models are mostly distilled from the latest closed-source frontier models. So every improvement OpenAI or Anthropic makes also improves the open-source alternatives that compete with them. The companies funding frontier research are inadvertently subsidising their own open-source rivals.
