Inference Economics / Token Margins
The unit economics that decide who profits
The shift from one-time training cost to recurring per-token inference cost is the central economic fact of the industry: reasoning models multiply tokens per query, and gross margin on inference determines whether labs, clouds, or apps capture value. Price wars (DeepSeek's disruption) collapsed token prices ~10x in 2024-25, threatening frontier-lab margins.
Trend
Token price collapse ~10x
How it fits the stack
Inference Economics / Token Margins with what it depends on (above) and what it feeds (below). The figure renders as a crawlable diagram and upgrades to an interactive 3D graph as it scrolls into view.
Inference Economics / Token Margins in the AI stack. Inference Economics / Token Margins with its immediate upstream dependencies (top) and downstream dependents (bottom) in the AI value chain. Hover a node in 3D, or read the full relationships below.
Graph data (text) — 2 entities, 1 relationships
- OpenAI —depends on→ Inference Economics / Token Margins