The trick: Scope Swap
IBM's CEO says open weights are 90% as good for 10% of the cost.
In Ramp's spending data, only 6.4% of AI-spending businesses pay for open-source models.
IBM's Arvind Krishna says businesses should, and do, pick open-weight models that are 90% as good at 10% to 25% of the token cost.
Before you read on. Your call?
TRUE, BUT
6.4%
a survey shows open-weight token share rising to 34%, but Ramp's spending data says most growth goes to cheaper closed models and only 6.4% of AI-spending businesses pay for open-source ones. No benchmark is named for the 90%, and IBM sells the on-premises racks.
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The trick has a name
We call it Scope Swap: applies to far less than it sounds like. You'll see it again. Learn to spot it →
Receipts
- Supports constellationr.com:
open-weight models currently anywhere from 25% to 10% of the token cost of the frontier models
- Supports constellationr.com:
Would you like something that's 10% of the cost if it's 90% as good as the best?
- Supports constellationr.com:
you can get going with maybe 2 or 3 racks, which is not a huge amount of infrastructure
- Supports constellationr.com:
in late, 2025 we began to see the gap shrink
- Context finance.yahoo.com:
Krishna noted that IBM's on-premises IT infrastructure is well-positioned for the shift
- Context finance.yahoo.com:
they are also getting worried if some of the AI spending is completely out of control with no real return
- Context newsroom.ibm.com:
infrastructure revenue up 4 percent, up 5 percent at constant currency
- Context newsroom.ibm.com:
distributed infrastructure up 31 percent, up 32 percent at constant currency
- Context thenextweb.com:
IBM has decided that the money in artificial intelligence is no longer only in building the cleverest model
- Supports rits.shanghai.nyu.edu:
found that open-weight models now handle 34% of enterprise AI token usage, up from 23% a year earlier.
- Refutes rits.shanghai.nyu.edu:
But Ramp says most of the growth is going to cheaper closed models
- Refutes rits.shanghai.nyu.edu:
Only 6.4% of AI-spending businesses in Ramp's data pay for open-source models.
- Refutes dev.to:
the article names no benchmark behind the 70, 50 and 90 figures, so the quality half cannot be checked from the public record.
- Refutes dev.to:
open weights are not uniquely cheap. small models are.
Open the Receipts Pack → What each source proves, every figure traced, and what would change our verdict.
