Why agentic AI needs an open inference stack

Source: Red Hat Blog

“Every AI lab is losing money serving your company right now. They know it. And they are doing it on purpose.”That was the opening line of an article that landed in my inbox the same week 3 numbers crystallized to make it clear why open inference is no longer optional.A developer built a simple notes app over a weekend using an open source coding agent with a direct API key. One page, one feature. Cost: $50. The next day, a $20/month subscription provided 50x more tokens.One engineer on our inference team consumed 300 million tokens through open-weight models in 2 days, doing the same work tha