DeepSeek cut prices 75%. The 100x problem remains
DeepSeek's recent decision to drastically cut pricing on its V4-Pro model by 75% should have been unequivocally good news for enterprise AI vendors and developers. Instead, many are discovering that cheaper models don’t automatically translate into healthier margins.
The reason is simple: While inference costs plummet, agent systems are voraciously consuming tokens faster than prices are declining. For the last 2 decades, software economics was dictated by the same rule. Infra became cheaper every year whereas applications became more capable. AI was initially hypothesized to follow the same pattern. As frontier models improved and token prices dropped, many assumed inference would become a negligible operating expense.That assumption has begun crumbling exponentially.
A chatbot usually turns one user question into one model call. An agentturns it into a chain of planning, retrieval, tool use, verification, summarization, and follow-up decisions. The user sees one answer. The vendor pays for the loop....
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