Grok 4.5 and GLM-5.2 kick off Token Price Wars | E22

**Jason Calacanis** (0:00)
The Frontier model and the open source price wars have arrived in the last two weeks, and man, it is incredible when tokens go down 90 or 99% as the case may be.

**Lon Harris** (0:10)
We used to have FU money, now we have FU tokens.

**Spiros Xanthos** (0:12)
Price drop is expected, right? As you know, now multiple models are very close to each other, right? Like, you know, I think they're gonna start competing in price.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:19)
Anthropic put mythos out, then rug pulled it. People were like, wait a second, we've been using this thing already. And this back and forth, I think, woke people up to, hey, we could give you a tool and then take the tool back. This could have cataclysmic ramifications for an enterprise specifically. You got two trust issues and a price issue. It feels like every week, speed is increasing. It's causing whiplash, yeah? Thanks to our friends at PayPal, the exclusive sponsor for This Week in AI. Try the payment and growth platform that's trusted by millions of customers worldwide. Paypal Open, start growing today at paypalopen.com. All right, everybody, welcome back to This Week in AI. This is a dedicated show where I like to ask three founders of leading AI companies to get together with me and talk about what they're working on and what's in the news.
You can't get this information anywhere else but this very program, This Week in AI. Search for it in your podcast player, YouTube, subscribe, get in the comments. We've been doing it for about 20 episodes and we are off to the races. We've got three amazing guests and my trusty partner in crime, my news reader, Lonnie. Donnie is here. Lon Harris. Who do we have on the program today?

**Lon Harris** (1:30)
It's episode 22, Jason. Actually, we made it.

**Jason Calacanis** (1:33)
Okay.

**Lon Harris** (1:34)
Incredible lineup of guests. We've got Sara Hooker from Adaption Labs. She's the co-founder and CEO. They are helping AI models continue learning and self-adjusting based on real-world use. Then we've got Manu Sharma from Labelbox. He's the CEO over there. They are a data factory combining human experts, software and AI tools for improved model training. Finally, Spiros Xanthos of Resolve AI. He's the co-founder and CEO over there. They are an AI site reliability engineer. They've got agents that will automatically investigate and fix bugs on your system without needing human intervention. That's the bit.

**Jason Calacanis** (2:12)
Amazing. And the docket has been crazy. The last week in AI has been nuts. I have been vibe coding like a lunatic.
I got access to the new Grok. I put that into my perplexity computer. I've been playing with GLM 5.2. I got a BitTensor subnet. They gave me a key. So I've had unlimited tokens. Let me tell you something. When you have unlimited tokens, that changes your behavior. But I think this, the number one story of the week, I'm sure it's on the docket here, Lon, is the price wars. The frontier model and the open source price wars have arrived in the last two weeks. And man, it is incredible when tokens go down 90 or 99 percent, as the case may be.

**Lon Harris** (2:55)
Yeah, we used to have FU money. Now we have FU tokens. You're correct, Jason.
Grok 4.5 from SpaceXAI arrived last week on July 8th. And along with the powerful Chinese model GLM52 from ZAI, we're getting dangerously close to frontier model quality without having to pay frontier model prices. Grok, of course, cost $2 per million input and $6 million per million output token. That's a 60% savings over Opus 4.8 or GPT 5.5. Elon calls it an Opus class model, but faster, more token, efficient and at lower cost. And on benchmarks, Grok and GLM 5.2, they're not quite frontier. They're at like a second step down, which people are sort of calling near frontier. So on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, Opus 4.8 gets a 56, GPT 5.5 gets a 55, Grok 4.5 gets a 54, GLM 5.2 gets a 51 So, I mean, we're talking about they're nipping at the heels here, Jason.

**Jason Calacanis** (3:57)
Yeah. And then obviously, the cost is the issue. I guess my question, I'll open it up to you, Spiros, is what are your thoughts on the plummeting price of tokens and what does that mean for the Frontier models and their massive build out now that open source, it feels like it's starting to catch up and what will that make the next year or two look like for enterprises, which obviously don't want people to get their intelligence. We had Alex Karp do a Alex Karp-esque CNBC hit where he's talking about AI sovereignty, which we've been talking about a whole bunch here.