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The Real AI Gap The AI everyone actually uses

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.
EN· ·Published inChirps
Luitpold-Alexander Zollorsch
Luitpold-Alexander Zollorsch
@luitpold.me

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 went broadly public yesterday, Fable 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.