[vineyardmike]

This is why the subscriptions are important. When the usage is (vaguely) unmetered, the provider has an incentive to make usage cheap on marginal use.

It aligns the incentives for faster, cheaper, terse and more reliable models, because the model providers pay the wasted tokens and electricity costs.

[jdiff]

That would seem to misalign the incentives in the opposite direction. Cut corners, reduce costs by any means necessary even to the detriment of performance. One of the most common comments I see here on the release of a new Anthropic model is that everyone better enjoy the 48 hours of access to an un-nerfed model before the cost cutting sets in.