{"slug": "the-ai-colander", "title": "The AI Colander", "summary": "AI models retain between high single digits and 40% of customers after five months, with frontier models losing their lead every 41 days on average. The price for a given level of benchmark performance is falling roughly 10x per year, as models like GPT 5.5 and Claude Opus 4.8 score similarly on intelligence but differ in cost. This rapid commoditization benefits startups and customers, who gain negotiating leverage as models are swapped monthly.", "body_md": "AI is like a colander. Customers pour in. Many pour out.\n\nHow many customers does a model retain after one month, two months, or three months? The answer lands somewhere between a social network & a mobile game.\n\nSoftware companies retain roughly 90% of customers through the first five months, an aggressive assumption. Facebook & Instagram hold closer to 80%. A typical mobile game keeps a few percent. Models land somewhere between high single digits & about 40%, with the stickiest foundational cohorts near the top of that range at month five.[1](#fn:1)\n\nThe average frontier model maintains its crown for 41 days. 2 The king is dead, long live the king, is a nearly monthly chant.\n\nThis pattern isn’t changing. Two days ago, OpenAI published this chart showing a surge of users for its newest model, Sol. The token growth chart is even steeper.\n\nBenchmarks are no longer purely performance-based. They include cost. Microsoft’s MAI-Code-1-Flash matches Claude Haiku 4.5 on SWE-Bench Verified using 60% fewer tokens.[3](#fn:3)\n\nFor the financial readers, this is the equivalent of the PEG ratio 4, where value is normalized by another metric. Here, intelligence is normalized by dollar.\n\nArtificial Analysis measures the same phenomenon at the frontier. GPT 5.5 & Claude Opus 4.8 score within a point of each other on the Intelligence Index near 60. GPT 5.5 is 28% less expensive to run.[5](#fn:5)\n\nxAI’s Grok 4.5 lands one tier below, at a score of 54, & runs the Intelligence Index at $0.31 per task, 60% less.[6](#fn:6)\n\nThe price for a given level of benchmark performance is falling roughly 10x per year on frontier knowledge, reasoning, math, & software engineering tasks.[7](#fn:7)\n\nUnlike the instability of the Middle Ages, this war of the weights benefits the community. Startups build on whichever model wins this month & re-route next month. Customers gain negotiating leverage every 41 days.\n\n-\nOpenRouter & a16z,\n\n*State of AI : An Empirical 100 Trillion Token Study with OpenRouter*—[https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10088](https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10088)[↩︎](#fnref:1) -\nTomasz Tunguz,\n\n*Darwin’s Finches in AI*—[https://tomtunguz.com/time-to-replicate/](https://tomtunguz.com/time-to-replicate/)[↩︎](#fnref:2) -\nTomasz Tunguz,\n\n*Intelligence Per Dollar*—[https://tomtunguz.com/tokens-per-result/](https://tomtunguz.com/tokens-per-result/)[↩︎](#fnref:3) -\nPEG ratio (price/earnings-to-growth) : a valuation metric that divides a stock’s price-to-earnings multiple by its earnings growth rate, normalizing valuation by growth.\n\n[↩︎](#fnref:4) -\nArtificial Analysis,\n\n*Intelligence Index*—[https://artificialanalysis.ai/evaluations/artificial-analysis-intelligence-index](https://artificialanalysis.ai/evaluations/artificial-analysis-intelligence-index)[↩︎](#fnref:5) -\nArtificial Analysis,\n\n*Grok 4.5 brings xAI to the intelligence frontier*—[https://artificialanalysis.ai/articles/grok-4-5-brings-spacexai-to-the-the-intelligence-frontier](https://artificialanalysis.ai/articles/grok-4-5-brings-spacexai-to-the-the-intelligence-frontier)[↩︎](#fnref:6) -\nArtificial Analysis & Epoch AI,\n\n*The Price of Progress : Price Performance & the Future of AI*—[https://arxiv.org/html/2511.23455v2](https://arxiv.org/html/2511.23455v2)[↩︎](#fnref:7)", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-ai-colander", "canonical_source": "https://www.tomtunguz.com/the-ai-colander/", "published_at": "2026-07-13 00:00:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-13 16:22:14.086636+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "large-language-models", "ai-products", "ai-infrastructure"], "entities": ["OpenAI", "Microsoft", "xAI", "OpenRouter", "a16z", "Artificial Analysis", "Epoch AI", "Tomasz Tunguz"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-ai-colander", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-ai-colander.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-ai-colander.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-ai-colander.jsonld"}}