The disappearing AI middle class

In 24 hours last week, OpenAI and DeepSeek made opposite bets on what frontier AI is worth. One says it is a closed product that just got more expensive. The other says it is open infrastructure that just got dramatically cheaper. The price gap between the two ends of the market is now wider than it has been in years, and the comfortable middle that most coding agents have been routing through is thinning out. Until last week, you could pick a model on a fairly smooth price-performance curve. There was a top tier, a middle tier, and a budget tier, and most workloads found a comfortable home somewhere on the slope. That curve still exists, but it has stretched. What used to be a continuous gradient now looks more like two clusters with a gap in between, and developers building agents, coding assistants, and high-volume inference pipelines now have to think harder about which side to route to.