@heyshrutimishra: Chinese models are 112x cheaper than Anthropic per million tokens. Chamath laid it out on CNBC: a "barrel of intelligen…
Summary
Chinese AI models are 112x cheaper than Anthropic per million tokens, reflecting the steepest commodity curve in technology history, with rapid compression of inference costs. Companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are betting on trust, safety, and enterprise contracts to maintain premium pricing, but the timeline is uncertain.
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Cached at: 07/16/26, 10:19 PM
Chinese models are 112x cheaper than Anthropic per million tokens.
Chamath laid it out on CNBC: a “barrel of intelligence” costs $56 from Anthropic, $26 from OpenAI, $1.50 from Meta, $1 from xAI and Google, and $0.50 from Chinese models.
That is not a pricing quirk. That is the steepest commodity curve any technology has run in recorded history.
Oil took 40 years to compress like this. Semiconductors took 20. AI inference is doing it in months.
The companies sitting at $26 and $56 are not stupid. They’re buying time… betting that trust, safety, and enterprise contracts hold the premium long enough for costs to catch up.
What they cannot bet on is the timeline.
Because the $0.50 model is not a demo. I’ve been inside the labs building it.
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