AI Giants Slash Prices and Offer Free Services in Fierce Competition
Major technology companies are escalating the competition for users in the artificial intelligence (AI) sector by significantly lowering the cost of access to their advanced services. Companies are now aggressively working to attract users by offering more features at no cost, triggering a wave of free AI tools and services.
Elon Musk’s xAI recently made headlines by announcing that it would provide its latest AI model, Grok 3, free of charge. This decision comes just days after the model’s launch. xAI’s move to offer Grok 3 for free is a strategic effort to quickly build a user base in the competitive AI landscape.
“We will make the world’s smartest AI, Grok 3, free until our servers melt down,” xAI stated. Grok 3, touted by Musk as the “smartest AI” at the time of its release, is designed to rival OpenAI’s offerings, especially in the AI assistant service arena.
Microsoft also joined the trend last month by making its AI assistant service, Copilot, more accessible. The company unlocked both voice conversation mode and the advanced reasoning function “Think Deeper” for all users at no cost. This move allows wider engagement with Microsoft’s AI tools.
OpenAI is also responding to the pressure, with plans to offer free users more features on its platform. OpenAI is currently rolling out the GPT-4o mini-based voice conversation mode to free ChatGPT users. Additionally, CEO Sam Altman revealed that free ChatGPT users will be able to use GPT-5 at the basic intelligence level without limits at a later date.
The rationale behind these bold expansions of free AI services is the rapid decrease in the cost of AI processing. The industry estimates that the inference cost of large language models (LLMs) is decreasing by a factor of ten each year, allowing companies to offer advanced services more affordably.
The trend extends beyond general AI users. Tech companies are also providing AI development tools for free to secure AI developers within their ecosystems. Microsoft launched a free version of GitHub Copilot, which supports up to 2,000 codes per month free of charge. Google also made significant moves by offering its AI coding assistant, Gemini Code Assistance, for free code generation up to 180,000 times per month.
Adding to the competitive landscape, China-based DeepSeek has also taken steps to make its AI model API more accessible, cutting the cost by up to 75%. DeepSeek has also released a mobile app for free, which has already proven popular, outranking ChatGPT on the U.S. Apple App Store.
