At the World Artificial Intelligence Conference on July 18, 2026, futurist Kevin
Kelly said if token (inference) costs become a primary concern, Chinese
open-source models would gain an advantage. He warned that while token costs are
mostly ignored today, persistent high token consumption will make cost critical;
a model delivering inference at one-tenth the cost of Anthropic would be
disruptive. Kelly added open-source ecosystems still need sizable funding to
operate because they are less commercially profitable than closed-source models
and building large models requires massive capital.
