---
title: "The AI everyone actually uses"
url: "https://lui.vn/the-ai-everyone-actually-uses/"
language: "en"
type: "chirp"
published: "2026-07-10T05:29:20+00:00"
modified: "2026-07-10T05:29:20+00:00"
categories: ["Chirps"]
kicker: "The Real AI Gap"
intro: "Frontier AI is mostly a paywall now - the free-tier floor isn't the 8-30b junk it gets called, and the spend really is hundreds of billions."
---

# The AI everyone actually uses

The frontier-vs-everyone-else gap is real – but “8-30b level” sells the floor short. Most people’s AI is Gemini 3.5 Flash, the default behind Google’s AI answers (2.5B+ users a month), or a free-tier GPT mini. Distilled last-gen flagships, a year behind and fast, not toy models.

And the wall’s lower than it was: [GPT-5.6](https://openai.com/index/gpt-5-6/) went broadly public yesterday, [Fable 5](https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-fable-5-mythos-5)‘s back on paid plans. Except “public” skips free ChatGPT entirely – the elite part is who pays 50 USD a million tokens, not who’s let in.

Push back on myself: nobody’s baffled. 2.5 billion people use this daily – they just see something useful-but-mid, priced like a frontier they’ll never open. And the spend is real. Google alone: ~180 billion USD this year, up from 31 billion in 2022. Hundreds of billions isn’t hyperbole, it’s the floor.