Alibaba's New 27B Model Fits on Your GPU and Nobody Can Take It Back

The price of a million output tokens from a frontier model has dropped roughly 95% since early 2024. That kind of deflation changes who builds what — and, more interestingly, who can afford to keep the servers running while they figure it out.

• Release cycles at some labs have compressed from six months to three weeks
• Major API providers are processing trillions of tokens per week, a volume that would have seemed absurd eighteen months ago
• Independent benchmark verification can't keep pace with the release cadence
• Most performance claims now come from the releasing lab itself, which means everyone is grading their own homework

Several labs are finding out that the hardest part of selling cheap infrastructure is what happens when too many people actually show up to use it.

The price of a million output tokens from a frontier model has dropped roughly 95% since early 2024. That kind of deflation changes who builds what — and, more interestingly, who can afford to keep the servers running while they figure it out.

• Release cycles at some labs have compressed from six months to three weeks
• Major API providers are processing trillions of tokens per week, a volume that would have seemed absurd eighteen months ago
• Independent benchmark verification can't keep pace with the release cadence
• Most performance claims now come from the releasing lab itself, which means everyone is grading their own homework

Several labs are finding out that the hardest part of selling cheap infrastructure is what happens when too many people actually show up to use it.