The era of ‘good enough’ AI has arrived

The release of Google’s latest AI models this week at Google I/O was yet another example of the direction of travel for the generative AI revolution. Facing a user base that is increasingly burning more tokens under basic subscriptions or API access, AI companies are starting to hike prices and throttle usage. In response to those cost pressures, consumers are beginning to cut their cloth accordingly. And while frontier AI providers are releasing ever more powerful models into the world, smaller companies are advancing, too. Often based in China, these are frequently accused of copying the innovations of U.S. models through techniques like distillation , or reverse engineering the way artificial intelligence models work by probing them and inferring their answers. What it means is that these slightly less powerful AI models are, despite lagging behind the bleeding edge, still plenty powerful for most people. The 2026 Stanford University AI Index found that AI models’ performance on the