The AI Colander

AI is like a colander. Customers pour in. Many pour out.

How many customers does a model retain after one month, two months, or three months? The answer lands somewhere between a social network & a mobile game.

Software companies retain roughly 90% of customers through the first five months, an aggressive assumption. Facebook & Instagram hold closer to 80%. A typical mobile game keeps a few percent. Models land somewhere between high single digits & about 40%, with the stickiest foundational cohorts near the top of that range at month five. 1

The average frontier model maintains its crown for 41 days. 2 The king is dead, long live the king, is a nearly monthly chant.

This pattern isn’t changing. Two days ago, OpenAI published this chart showing a surge of users for its newest model, Sol. The token growth chart is even steeper.

Benchmarks are no longer purely performance-based. They include cost. Microsoft’s MAI-Code-1-Flash matches Claude Haiku 4.5 on SWE-Bench Verified using 60% fewer tokens. 3

For the financial readers, this is the equivalent of the PEG ratio 4 , where value is normalized by another metric. Here, intelligence is normalized by dollar.

Artificial Analysis measures the same phenomenon at the frontier. GPT 5.5 & Claude Opus 4.8 score within a point of each other on the Intelligence Index near 60. GPT 5.5 is 28% less expensive to run. 5

xAI’s Grok 4.5 lands one tier below, at a score of 54, & runs the Intelligence Index at $0.31 per task, 60% less. 6

The price for a given level of benchmark performance is falling roughly 10x per year on frontier knowledge, reasoning, math, & software engineering tasks. 7

Unlike the instability of the Middle Ages, this war of the weights benefits the community. Startups build on whichever model wins this month & re-route next month. Customers gain negotiating leverage every 41 days.

OpenRouter & a16z, State of AI : An Empirical 100 Trillion Token Study with OpenRouter — https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10088 ↩︎

Tomasz Tunguz, Darwin’s Finches in AI — https://tomtunguz.com/time-to-replicate/ ↩︎

Tomasz Tunguz, Intelligence Per Dollar — https://tomtunguz.com/tokens-per-result/ ↩︎

PEG ratio (price/earnings-to-growth) : a valuation metric that divides a stock’s price-to-earnings multiple by its earnings growth rate, normalizing valuation by growth. ↩︎

Artificial Analysis, Intelligence Index — https://artificialanalysis.ai/evaluations/artificial-analysis-intelligence-index ↩︎

Artificial Analysis, Grok 4.5 brings xAI to the intelligence frontier — https://artificialanalysis.ai/articles/grok-4-5-brings-spacexai-to-the-the-intelligence-frontier ↩︎

Artificial Analysis & Epoch AI, The Price of Progress : Price Performance & the Future of AI — https://arxiv.org/html/2511.23455v2 ↩︎