Token cost crashed 850x since 2020
The hosts noted that token costs had crashed 850x since 2020, though the trend appeared to be reversing with supply constraints pushing prices back up.
Snapshot · God Mode Podcast
EP25: Anthropic vs OpenAI, SpaceX chaos, 25 lessons in 25 episodes
Explore episode
Aug 8, 2026
Where this was said
25 lessons, war two, closed versus open source
At 39:00 · chapter starts 37:59
The open vs closed source war has been the most economically consequential theme of the archive. Lesson nine recasts the Bloomberg terminal moment from episode 2 — building a $30,000 professional tool for free with vibe coding — as the moment the SaaS disruption thesis went from speculative to obvious. The 850x token cost crash since 2020 is then immediately complicated by everything the hosts have been discussing today: supply constraints, DeepSeek price hikes, Gavin Baker's 10x demand warning. The lesson isn't that costs will keep falling; it's that Jevons paradox is real and demand will absorb any efficiency gains. Airtable's acquisition brings the SaaS apocalypse into sharp relief: $1.2 billion for a company worth $11 billion four years ago. Ben's analytical frame is clean — products whose value lived in their user interface are being destroyed, while infrastructure plays like Vercel and Supabase (the vibe-coding era's equivalent of Airtable for the no-code era) are thriving. ElevenLabs closes the section as the episode's positive case study: an application-layer AI company that has survived commoditisation by staying specialised, customisable, and execution-focused.
The SaaS Apocalypse Gets a Price Tag: Airtable's $1.2B Exit
Airtable was sold for $1.2 billion against a 2021 peak of $11 billion. The pattern is clear: products whose value lived in their user interface are being destroyed by AI, while infrastructure plays like Vercel and Supabase are thriving.
Airtable sold for $1.2B vs $11B peak
Airtable was acquired by European private equity for approximately $1.2 billion, compared to its peak valuation of $11 billion in 2021.
Inference spend doubling every 45 days
Chamath's firm 8090 reported that inference spend is doubling every 45 days, driven by continuously expanding AI use cases.
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