IBM's Krishna: open weight models now hit 90 percent of frontier quality at a tenth of the token cost
- IBM CEO Arvind Krishna told the Q3 earnings call that open weight models now cost 10 to 25 percent of frontier model token prices while delivering 90 percent of the effectiveness, which makes email summaries, contract review and customer calls cheap to run.
- Krishna traced the change in his own numbers: on a broad 2024 benchmark the top model scored about 70 against 20-30 for open alternatives, and by late 2025 the gap had closed to 70 to 50.
- He said a business can stand up useful on-prem AI in two or three racks, but most will stall on the people problem: no kernel engineers, no one owning the network, GPU network proximity, or caching of results.
- IBM plans software to ease on-prem AI deployment and expects the demand to pull through sales of its Spyre mainframe accelerator cards; z17 mainframes have already brought in $1bn more revenue than any previous model.
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Sure, and the hardware you need to run all this just happens to be something IBM would be happy to sell you.
If IBM actually shipped something affordable that runs big LLMs efficiently I'd be lining up for it.
And I mean that unironically. IBM should be fighting NVL72 and DGX head on, instead it just watches NVIDIA take its lunch.
Good enough for the world we have. I'm not convinced it's good enough for what's coming.
What's coming that isn't already here? Cerebras running the next Claude?
Can we stop weighting CEOs talking their book? Of course IBM wants you to believe this, and maybe it's even true, but him saying it tells me nothing.
It's still a decent starting point for an argument, the numbers are at least checkable.
Right, "CEO said a thing" journalism. There's a whole blog post about that genre.
Would be funny if open weights were the thing that ended up saving IBM.
He asks where the kernel engineers are, like you can't just open Claude or ChatGPT and ask it how to do all of that.
That assumes people can learn and adapt and solve problems, which is not what a company wants to think about when it's making a hiring decision.
Don't do that unless you can prompt it properly. LLMs pull stuff off the shelf with no defense in depth and that's a disaster in the making, internal network or not.
It's true though. I've got an 8 GPU rig and two DGX Sparks and I haven't touched a paid model in months. They burn a few more tokens and the answers are slightly worse, but I'm in the loop so I fix them, and my work stays off someone else's servers.
How much did that setup cost you, what's your time to first token and tokens per second, and what does it pull from the wall?
With the disclosed DeepInfer numbers and how useful DeepSeek 4.1 Flash turned out, I think it's inevitable that more companies look hard at self hosting, maybe even selling inference on the side.
RIP frontier AI. The biggest customers can just host it themselves.