The Bifurcation in the AI Market

The AI market is splitting into two segments: proprietary models retain pricing power in mission-critical enterprise applications despite being 10-100x more expensive, while open-source models capture cost-sensitive volume at stable ~22-25% market share. Programming has achieved product-market fit as the dominant use case (45-60% for leading enterprise providers), while roleplay dominates consumer usage, and retention rates vary significantly by model and use case.