tokens too cheap to meter

The price of using machine learning intelligence is decreasing by several orders of magnitude a year and shows no signs of slowing. We are likely to see LLMs integrated into every part of computing as infrastructure, not just as a product, in the next year or two. We are likely to see LLMs running locally at current frontier-quality on commodity hardware in the next 3-6 years. Starting very soon, we are likely to see quality and access become the limiting factor to AI 1 use, not sheer number of tokens. Is this really happening? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, so I collected a whole bunch of evidence. AI can be either proprietary (such as GPT-6 Astra) or open weight (such as GLM-5.3-flash). Open weight models can be either hosted (e.g. by Z.ai) or local. Generally, models intended to be run locally will be much smaller, such as Muse Glimmer or Qwen3 Coder. Improvements in one don't always affect improvements in the others. Improvements that affect all AI GPUs GPUs…