My main worry is - once this is all over, the market consolidates and using LLMs will become a requirement in job listings, what's the highest price per million tokens companies will be able to charge us?

Currently on a given day I'm chewing through approximately the equivalent of my lunch money, but where there's opportunity to extract wealth, someone will find a way to do it.

My (potentially naive) take is that open models will save us. The biggest markets for LLMs (e.g. coding) are narrow-enough to be served well by smaller models with proper RL. Cursor's Composer 2 (created from a Kimi K2.5 base) is a great example, and I expect it to be the first of many.

The wealth of great open models provide an excellent base for fine-tuning, distillation, and RL. I see a lot of untapped potential in the field of bespoke, purpose-built models that can be served far more cheaply than the frontier competition. I would not be surprised if we see frontier-adjacent experiences running comfortably on a Mac Mini by year end.

With frontier models seemingly hitting diminishing returns in quality, I struggle to see a world in which gigantic, expensive, general-purpose models don't become increasingly niche.

It's already a job requirement for a bunch of places, they're just not listing it. I lost out on a job recently because I haven't used cursor ai.

Jensen is already talking about $1000/mil tokens soon.

But there is no real higher limit. Imagine a LLM which could answer the question "what does my company need to do to beat the competition?". And then realize that the competition asks their LLM the same question. So now everybody is bidding the price up or using more tokens to get a better answer