Mark Zuckerberg wants to put superintelligence in the hands of billions of people.
DigitalOcean Holdings, Inc (NYSE:DOCN) CEO Paddy Srinivasan says the economics of AI may finally be moving in that direction.
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In a sweeping essay Monday, the Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META) CEO argued that increasingly powerful AI should not be controlled by a small group of companies or institutions. Meta plans to offer free versions of its AI tools to billions of people, while allowing users to pay for more computing power.
Srinivasan, meanwhile, sees a technology shift that could make broad AI access more practical: open-weight models that deliver increasingly strong performance at much lower costs.
"Open weight models are balancing out the intelligence per dollar equation and driving even more usage of AI," Srinivasan told Benzinga in an exclusive email interview.
That could be important for Zuckerberg’s vision.
Open AI Models Are Changing the Math
The appeal of open-weight models is not simply that they can be cheaper.
Businesses can also customize them using their own data and, in some cases, run them on their own infrastructure. Srinivasan said that can help companies keep their intellectual property within the enterprise while adapting models to proprietary information and real-world usage.
The result is a different way to think about AI spending.
Instead of paying the highest available price for every task, companies can choose models based on what they actually need. Srinivasan said the goal is the "right model, right cost, for every task."
DigitalOcean is already building around that idea, offering access to multiple models through its inference infrastructure. Its platform supports models from providers including OpenAI, Anthropic and open-weight developers, allowing customers to choose among them based on factors such as cost and performance.
The Frontier Model May Not Be Needed Every Time
Srinivasan said frontier models — the most capable and typically most expensive systems — are needed for only about 25% of the work among the customers he sees.
The other 75% can often be handled by open-weight models, creating what he described as a typical 25/75 split between closed and open-weight models.
That doesn’t mean OpenAI or Anthropic suddenly lose most of their business. The hardest reasoning and specialized tasks can still justify frontier models.
But it does suggest that AI adoption doesn’t have to depend entirely on the economics of the most expensive systems.
And that’s where Zuckerberg’s vision meets Srinivasan’s thesis.
Meta is betting that powerful AI should reach billions. Open-weight models could help make that access cheaper, more customizable and less dependent on a handful of providers. Meta itself is leaning into the approach, with Zuckerberg saying the company plans to resume releasing some open-source models, while Meta also launched the smaller open-weight Muse Glimmer model for personal computers.
The bigger AI race, then, may not simply be about building the smartest model.
It could be about making useful intelligence cheap enough, flexible enough and accessible enough that far more people can actually use it.
For Zuckerberg, that’s the vision.
For Srinivasan, "intelligence per dollar" may be what makes it economically possible.
Image via Shutterstock
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