“We could take one of the Chinese open weight models ... and if you run your own GPUs with a little bit of optimization ... we could drop the cost to about $1 to $2 for a million tokens. Which enterprise in the world will not accept a 10 times, or in this case, a 40 times cheaper answer for effectively what can do 95% of the work?”
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg · Money & Markets · October 2026
Asked about open versus frontier models, the IBM CEO compared roughly $20 to $50 per million tokens at the frontier with a self-hosted open-weight model. He added IP protection and geopolitics as further reasons, and estimated that 75 to 90 percent of all token use will move to open-weight models.
Transcript
…there's pacing the frontier, there's now effectively very reasonable alternatives that are open weight at a minimum. Your philosophy around the entire spectrum, and just give us a sense of how we should think about models and capabilities over the next couple of years. Nikesh, you want to start?
…us, for example, running a defender model, we're most more than likely going to take an open weight model, use our own proprietary data, train it, manage the weights, because that's what gives us the auditability, the explainability, and the open system. We can actually explain how that happened.
…lens to get to the same exact end conclusions. Let's take economics. So, today, $20 for a million tokens for probably generation minus one, 50 if you want to go to the most extreme. We could take one of the Chinese open weight models, take a Kimik3, something, 800 billion parameters, and if you run your own GPUs with a little bit of optimization, but I'm talking like a week of engineering work, we could drop the cost to about $1 to $2 for a million tokens. Which enterprise in the world will not accept a 10 times, or in this case, a 40 times cheaper answer for effectively what can do 95% of the work? So, I think economics is important. The second is going to be: at the end of the day, you just talked previously about chain of thought, not just the end tokens. Well, effectively, then you're giving away your IP if that chain of thought can be captured and logged and audited by somebody else. So, brand and IP is going to drive people to say, I need to run the models on my own. Well, you can't…
And the token consumption that's left over, is that because you actually need it, or is that because it's a default behavior and people are too lazy to change?
Okay, so I'm going to talk about developer behavior. And since I was one, I'm making fun of myself in a younger age. Developers are lazy. They're going to use the most expensive, the most expensive answer unless you put a control on it. Because it's easy.
Yeah.
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