Inference Costs Are Collapsing—But Frontier AI Still Commands Premium Pricing

Inference costs are compressing from three vectors simultaneously: quantization (8-15x compression at 99.5% accuracy), hardware specialization, and GPU price collapse (H100 from $8/hr to $2/hr). Yet GPT-5.4's 75% OSWorld score proves frontier capabilities can still command premium pricing. The result is a bifurcating market: commodity inference faces margin destruction while frontier computer-use capabilities remain economically defensible.