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by lumost 15 days ago
For equal capability tokens, there has been about a 10x drop in cost every 6 months.

We are still chasing the best because the best is moving rapidly, but it’s a simple thought experiment to work out what the cost to serve an 8B model from 2 years ago is in a world of 2T models.

Note: parameter counts are illustrative. Concretely, qwen3.6 27B delivers opus 4.5 capability at 1/27th the cost on openrouter. Single chip llama3 8b performance can exceed 17k tokens/sec.
2 comments
byzantinegene 14 days ago
8B models would be consider obsolete in the world of 2T models, at least if we're talking about the competitiveness of OpenAI/Anthropic. The only reason why they are valued so highly is their supposed dominance at the top end.
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lumost 14 days ago
The main story of agent use cases is in enterprise so far. An enterprise will only pay for a model capable of handling the task and no more. Most enterprise's see no need to hire PhDs as factory line workers.

Coding is an interesting case as [1] the pace of progress has been absurd and [2] it's hard to put an upper bound on required capability. However hard to put a bound on and will are different, it's quite possible that the average engineer will cease to see the benefit of rapid progress - or that their employer will be satisfied with lower tier models.

How smart of a model do you need to build a high quality CRUD app for internal users? Or build a scalable web service?

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byzantinegene 14 days ago
yes, which is why the revenue growth story is not looking so great for Anthropic/OpenAI, when open-source alternatives are not far behind with much lower costs.
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joshuahedlund 14 days ago
> For equal capability tokens, there has been about a 10x drop in cost every 6 months

Is this still happening? Opus 4.5 was six months ago, can you get its capabilities for 1/10 cost now? Are we on track to get the same for 4.6 in a couple months?

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lumost 14 days ago
Pretty much, Kimi K2.6 is opus 4.6 quality for coding. If you include discounts due to more efficient input caching it is around 1/10th of opus4.6.

https://openrouter.ai/moonshotai/kimi-k2.6

The march of cost efficiency moves on.

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joshuahedlund 13 days ago
Why haven’t I heard of this? Is it available in IDEs like Cursor?
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