The AI price split: why the middle market is disappearing

TL;DR Summary
OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 pricing (about $5 input, $30 output per million tokens) and DeepSeek’s open-weight V4-Pro/Flash offerings have created a two-cluster AI market, widening the cost gap between a closed, vendor-managed product and cheaper, open infrastructure. The once-smooth price-performance curve now shows a thinning middle, forcing developers to route workloads across the high-end integrated stack and the lower-cost open-weight stack, and reshaping how AI agents and coding assistants are built and deployed.
- The disappearing AI middle class The New Stack
- Introducing GPT-5.5 OpenAI
- OpenAI’s New GPT-5.5 Powers Codex on NVIDIA Infrastructure — and NVIDIA Is Already Putting It to Work NVIDIA Blog
- “Mythos-like hacking, open to all”: Industry reacts to OpenAI’s GPT 5.5 The New Stack
- GPT-5.5 is generally available for GitHub Copilot The GitHub Blog
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