Ilman Shazhaev, Founder and CEO of Dizzaract, joins Rachel Pether at the ADX with a sharp reframe on the AI price war: the falling cost of API access is not the same as real efficiency gains. Much of it is being subsidised by companies burning capital to capture market share, and when those subsidies stop, the economics of the AI stack will look very different.
His framework for understanding where value moves is built around the open versus closed model divide. Today the total AI market is approximately $55 billion, with closed models, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, accounting for around $46 billion of that. But open models are growing rapidly at around $8.5 billion, and he predicts another 100x growth in the coming years, partly because this summer open models became equally strong as closed models on many parameters for the first time. When a company switches from a closed model to an open model, its monthly AI bill can drop by 100 times.
His longer-term macro point is worth sitting with: $7 trillion in investment into AI data centres is expected over the next five to ten years, a massive pressure on the global economy, especially when you factor in power grids, older chips needing to be repurposed, and infrastructure that must keep pace with new chip generations.