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AI model prices are plummeting
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2 recent developments in the AI field.

Robots at a store

It's becoming cheaper to build on top of powerful AI models.

Here are 2 recent news stories to "prove" this:

Mistral starts offering a free tier

Three days ago, Mistral, one of the world's largest AI companies, has announced a new free tier for developers.

You've read that right: free API access for an AI model.

OpenAI does not offer free API access to its models.

Gemini does offer a free tier to its AI model.

Mistral has also drastically reduced some of the prices for its AI models:

AI models are becoming a commodity.

Alibaba just released 100+ open-source AI models

Meta said this today:

"The future of AI is open source."

Alibaba seems to agree. They've just released over 100 (that's not a typo) open-source AI models for text-to-text, text-to-video, etc.

The models range from 0.5 to 72 billion parameters and support over 29 languages, according to Alibaba.

What all this means for us, indie founders

AI MVPs are getting cheaper.

Have an idea for an AI app? You don't have to pay OpenAI for credits. Roll out a new Mistral instance, or use one of Meta's/Alibaba's open source models and you're good to go.

Got some traction? If you want to get some funding and have users, you have no shortage of investors. YCombinator's batch in 2023 consisted of 35% AI startups. That number has almost doubled in 2024.

It's never been better time to be be a developer and a founder.

Photo of Darko Gjorgjievski Darko Gjorgjievski

Darko is a journalist for Indie Hackers and an entrepreneur. He writes about AI and acquisition channels that work for founders. He runs a newsletter called Growth Trends where he curates news items focused on user acquisition and new product ideas.

  1. 1

    Still true after almost a year

  2. 1

    Two factors are causing this: increasing compute efficiency due to better GPUs and tons of VC money flowing into AI. It's an ongoing price war to capture market share. It is in no way a healthy or sustainable price drop.

  3. 1

    Prices dropped 99% over the past 18 months - curious what this will do to the SaaS landscape and price-per-user model.

  4. 1

    Tokens are getting cheaper all the time and will eventually become a commodity.

  5. 1

    This was inevitable.

  6. 1

    There needs to be a balance between cost vs usability/task reliability. The smaller models seem great, cheap, open but also tend to underperform on consumer grade applications.

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  8. 1

    Even with open source models, you need to host them somewhere, right? To use it?

    1. 1

      Check out Ollama

  9. 1

    Great! now we need someone to take all these AI's and link them together to form a master AI

    1. 2

      It can be called AINet, sounds like something from a film I watched.

      1. 1

        With AI models becoming more affordable and accessible ( Mistral, Meta, and Alibaba), it’s opening doors for smaller teams to jump into AI product development maybe you can make it a reality. It feels like the perfect time to start experimenting with all these new tools. Definitely a game-changer, but it’s about smart choices, cheaper doesn't equal better in this space. Love the name AInet! go for it!

  10. 1

    This comment was deleted a year ago

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