AI is becoming a bargain hunter's market, with a few luxury models on top
AI and ML
Inference is become a commodity except for frontier models
The price of AI tokens is fluctuating widely, with some becoming cheaper and others more expensive, leaving users of AI services struggling to assess if the price is right.
Aman Panjwani, an AI engineer based in India, says that GPT-4-class model output cost about $20 per million tokens in late 2022. Today, equivalent capability costs about $0.40, a 55x decline in less than four years, he said, citing Introl's December 2025 unit-economics analysis.
"When DeepSeek released its R1 reasoning model in January 2025 at $0.55 per million input tokens and $2.19 output – against OpenAI's o1-preview at $15 and $60, launched just four months earlier – the entire market repriced overnight," Panjwani said in an analysis provided to The Register. "A 97 percent discount tends to do that."
During this same period, prices for cutting-edge frontier...
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