AI inference market bifurcates between commodity and frontier models

AI inference pricing is splitting into cheap commodity serving and premium frontier models, so teams should compare cost per completed task rather than sticker-price tokens alone. The Register reports that one engineer estimates GPT-4-class output fell from about $20 per million tokens in late 2022 to about $0.40 today, while newer frontier systems such as Google's Gemini 3.5 Flash and Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 still carry higher effective costs. Google and Anthropic's own launch and pricing pages support the broader pattern: frontier models are marketed around advanced agentic capability, longer context, and metered usage, not just low unit prices. The operational takeaway is to measure tokens consumed per workflow, retries, latency, and contract model before choosing a provider.