Alibaba just released its third proprietary model in days. Google's Gemini Flash-Lite costs $0.25 per million tokens. NVIDIA's Nemotron runs 2.2x faster than GPT-OSS-120B. The LLM cost war has arrived — here's what it means for architects choosing AI infrastructure in 2026.
Google just made Gemini Code Assist free and priced Flash-Lite at $0.25/M tokens. After 15 years building production systems, here's what this cost collapse really changes about how we build.
GPT-4 level AI cost $30/M tokens in 2023. Today it's under $1. Here's the technical architecture that lets you capture 90%+ of that savings without sacrificing quality.
Mistral Large 3's MoE architecture delivers 92% of GPT-5.2's performance at 15% of the cost. As a technical lead who has run open-source LLMs in production, here's where it works and where it fails.
Real-time per-minute cost tracking, provider comparison (OpenAI Realtime ~$0.053/min vs Gemini Live ~$0.029/min), budget enforcement with soft/hard limits, and the self-hosting math that saves 90% on transport.
The real cost of AI voice interviews, broken down per minute. Managed vs self-hosted economics, the three tipping points, and how to get from $3.45 per interview to under $1.00.
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