A Billion Brains

Discover how the cost collapse of AI and new routing tools are driving the era of mass intelligence—where a billion users gain access to powerful models shaping work, learning, and innovation.

Cost collapse changes everything

The story of 2025 isn’t “Model X beats Model Y.” It’s the cost floor falling out. Tokens that once cost ~$50 per million at the GPT-4 era now approach cents, and energy per prompt has plummeted to the Netflix-seconds range. That shift flips the business model: ad-supported access and generous free tiers become economically sane, and suddenly a billion people can try powerful models without a manual or a credit card. For software teams, this means pilots don’t stall at procurement; they scale. It also reframes ROI: not “is the frontier model perfect?” but “is the good-enough model cheap enough to run everywhere?” When background agents start consuming trillions of tokens—coding, QA’ing, reconciling data while humans do other work—unit economics drive architecture more than leaderboard deltas. In short: the platform shift isn’t just capability—it's capability multiplied by near-zero marginal cost.

From prompts to routers: unlocking real use cases

Another quiet revolution is UX. Users aren’t picking models; routers are. “GPT-5” as a switchboard—shuttling trivial chat to fast nanos and hard problems to reasoners—reduces friction and widens access to “the right horsepower” automatically. Combine that with instruction-following multimodal editors (think Google’s “Nano Banana”/Gemini 2.5 Flash Image): pro-grade edits via plain language, no Photoshop apprenticeship required. Small UX changes unlock large value surfaces—content localization at scale, design iteration loops inside product teams, and non-experts shipping assets that once required specialists. Enterprises will measure progress less by benchmark inches and more by “unlock score”: how many net-new tasks can non-experts complete, and at what cost per task? For software firms, the win is clear—ship agentic features that hide complexity, route intelligently, and convert “try once in a chatbox” into durable, background automation.