Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Last week's frontier costs almost nothing
Two Price Curves
Today the frontier is infinity dollars a token. You can't have it. The model that led a week ago is collapsing to zero.
Why Consumers Need It
Consumer AI software needs that second curve. Most consumer products are free to try, and that does not work when incremental distribution carries high costs. The magic of software is zero-cost incremental distribution.
The Harness Wars
Computers now have emotive and emotional texture for the first time in 40 or 50 years, and more ambitious consumer products have not been built yet. The forecast is that today's frontier compute drops to maybe 50 or 100 bucks in two or three years. 2027 becomes the harness wars, a war for a billion consumers, with the browser wars back on.
How fast do AI prices fall?
Epoch AI, a research group, analyzed in 2025 how fast the price of running a model at a fixed level of performance dropped. It found declines ranging from about 9 times to 900 times per year, depending on the benchmark. The drops come from cheaper hardware, more efficient software, and smaller models trained to match bigger ones. That training method is called distillation, and it was described in a 2015 paper by Geoffrey Hinton, Oriol Vinyals, and Jeff Dean.
How did Microsoft win the first browser war?
Netscape Navigator led browser share in the mid-1990s. Microsoft released Internet Explorer in 1995 and bundled it with Windows, and its share reached more than 90 percent by the early 2000s. The U.S. Department of Justice sued Microsoft in 1998 over its business practices, including the bundling. Netscape was acquired by AOL in 1999.
Why does AI break software's zero-cost rule?
Traditional software costs almost nothing to serve to one more user, because copying is nearly free. A language model must run a computation on specialized chips for every response, so each added user adds compute cost. Providers price by tokens for that reason. OpenAI's ChatGPT Plus launched at $20 a month in February 2023.
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