The price wars have begun

THE ACCOUNT had been dormant since July 2023. Its last entry, posted under the handle @finkd around the week Twitter became X, was a meme of two Spider-Men pointing at each other. On Thursday, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's chief executive, reactivated it to announce a price.

Muse Spark 1.1, he wrote, was "a strong agentic and coding model at a very low price," available through the new Meta Model API and inside Meta AI. He left the benchmark numbers for the blog. Elon Musk, who folded his xAI into SpaceX earlier this year and had shipped a cut-price Grok the day before, replied with a single word: jinx.

The price was $1.25 per million input tokens and $4.25 per million output. It undercut Grok 4.5, which SpaceXAI had listed at $2 and $6 a day earlier, and it ran at a quarter of the input cost of Claude Opus 4.8, Anthropic's flagship. For a company that had spent years giving its models away as open weights, attaching a price at all was the news. That the price reset the floor for near-frontier models was the message.