Cheap AI models now tie the expensive ones. So why did this engineer spend $40?

Cheap AI models now tie expensive ones on routine work, according to strategist Nate B. Jones. Everyone's optimizing for cost—the obvious move. But once execution gets cheap, the bottleneck shifts from price to imagination. A forty-dollar experiment revealed the distinction: a task that cheap models failed on, expensive ones solved. The historical parallel: Apple and BlackBerry had equal execution, but Apple imagined differently. Jones's thesis: if your task list hasn't changed in a year, model costs aren't your constraint. Imagination and permission are.

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