AI Has Passed Its Hype & Is Now Affordable. It's Time To Work.

The cheaper it gets, the more it spreads.

Image by Adobe Firefly

It is controversial whether AI was hype or not, but the truth is, several companies grew out of the hype. Nvidia, for example, gained over a trillion dollars in valuation just because the world feared that they would miss out on investing in the AI foundation.

So regardless of whether it's hype or not, there is one thing for certain, the price point is not perfect at the moment. Most people can use ChatGPT for free and you would think that that's the end of it. But the truth is, by price point, you need to refer to the API costs of actually using this technology.

Understanding AI's Growth Potential

AI is like the Internet and you're looking to create a new website on the Internet. When “websites” become mainstream is when artificial intelligence actually grows. All the use cases that are available at this stage are just tips of the iceberg of what people can actually build with artificial intelligence.

The only problem was the price barrier. There were some models that were cheap like ChatGPT's chat model, but there are some models that are extremely expensive, like Runway's video AI generation model. It goes all the way to fifty cents for ten seconds of video generation and that's just expensive for anyone to offer to their customers.

The Evolution of AI Models and Pricing

Now there is a model that was in between. It used to be very expensive and it's now a lot cheaper and that is — OpenAI's reasoning model. This reasoning model from my testing and practical analysis is that it just combining a few prompts together to lead somewhere.

So instead of AI answering immediately with something, it would circle around and keep prompting over and over again until it actually reaches a conclusion (similar to how a thought process works in a human brain.)

It's fun and it could produce more accurate numbers. Then China's DeepSeek released a model that was a lot cheaper than OpenAI, leading it to the inevitable. OpenAI released another model that is extremely cheap. This actually questions their authenticity in this sense. This company really needs a bit of transparency. If you offer a model for $60. Then when China gets an alternative, so you offer it for $4. Then there is a question mark on your profitability.

The Impact of Global Competition

Nevertheless, what happened was China created DeepSeek, and made it affordable.

Now, DeepSeek is a concept. What is going to happen is that startups around the world are going to start offering AI on a cheaper pricing point. So video generation is not going to cost that much. Image generation is not going to cost that much, etc…

It's going to keep going down until the mass developers and creators could actually use AI in a proper use case.

The Growth Phase of AI

This is exactly when the market starts building and creating beauty. Let me tell you what you can do in this particular growth phase. I call this the growth phase because I always compare it to the Internet. The Internet, when it was invented was a weird concept to a lot of people and people never thought that they actually needed it.