Kovendo

AI is becoming dramatically cheaper to access. Stanford's AI Index found that the cost of achieving GPT-3.5-level performance fell by more than 280×, from $20 to $0.07 per million tokens, between November 2022 and October 2024. At the same time, open-weight models have become increasingly competitive with closed AI, although the performance gap continues to shift as new models are released. These numbers explain why open source AI models have moved from a niche technology for researchers into a serious option for developers, startups, enterprises, and organizations that want more control over their AI systems. Instead of sending every prompt and document to a closed AI service, developers can increasingly download an AI model, run it on their own hardware or cloud infrastructure, connect it to private data, customize its behavior, and integrate it into their applications. Models such as Llama, Qwen, Mistral, DeepSeek, Gemma, and other ...