Google released their new Gemini 3.5 "flash" model at I/O yesterday. For those who aren't familiar, the "flash" model is typically marketed as the lower end and the "pro" model is the higher end for each given model generation.
The interesting thing here is that the new "flash" model is almost as expensive as the "pro" from the previous generation.
This fits a trend: OpenAI's GPT-5.5 was 2x the price of GPT-5.4, and Claude Opus 4.7 is around 1.46x the price of 4.6 when you take the new tokenizer into account.
It feels like all three of the major AI labs are starting to probe the price tolerance of their API customers.
Speed running enshittification - a process that typically only works when people are reliant on your product and have no other option than to pay the inflated price
Google released their new Gemini 3.5 "flash" model at I/O yesterday. For those who aren't familiar, the "flash" model is typically marketed as the lower end and the "pro" model is the higher end for each given model generation.
The interesting thing here is that the new "flash" model is almost as expensive as the "pro" from the previous generation.
As my favourite "neutral-but-not-really" AI booster Simon Willison says:
Speed running enshittification - a process that typically only works when people are reliant on your product and have no other option than to pay the inflated price