High cost of AI models compared to their performance

Signals over time

5 observed signals across 1 sources, tracked for 7 days. Confidence: low.

What people are saying Observed

• “I'm not the poster you responded to, but I can tell you that historically the Gemini models have lagged behind Anthropic (the clear leader) and OpenAI's best models where coding in particular is concerned. Opus 5.5 is, right now, the consensus best coding model. That said, I'm extremely impressed with Argon thus far. I take back everything bad I've ever said about their AI strategy. Argon is very good and very fast. It might be competitive at coding, but it's too early to say.”

  Hacker News · frustration

• “This is still an entire generation behind in real-world performance. I'd say it's even behind ds4.1f in the limited testing I have done so far. It actually reminds me of 5.5 haiku more than anything, but the prompt intelligence is as bad as mimo models.”

  Hacker News · complaint

• “Yea if i use opus 5.5 in api through openrouter and pi agent harness I will easily burn 50-100$ a day (and with fable 5.1 i could burn 200$ easily). Whereas i have now been using a claude code subscription for 2 weeks using 5.5 at all times and have never hit a limit. I often run 6+ agent sessions at once. I do think its important long term to not be reliant on these companies as you don't have control over the system prompts, the thinking tokens, and once the subsidization stops or the company is public they will be required to start making money and thus raise prices. But models may get more intelligent and cheaper once that time comes so it may be a non issue.”

  Hacker News · frustration

• “I think the economic questions are easier to evaluate. If AI consistently delivers better results at lower costs, there's a pretty strong argument for adopting it. But that is not the case for the large frontier models that actually produce the "best" quality out of the rest, they are just too expensive. But the smaller models are somewhat profitable as they require almost no comparable compute. The surveillance concern is definitely justified and I think it is already happening before our own eyes..”

  Hacker News · frustration

• “About time Anthropic released a competitive cheap model. Haiku 4.5 has been too expensive compared to its performance for months now (in fact I don't remember being too impressed even when it was released). This one actually looks worth using in some scenarios. If it's really as much of a step up from Luna as the benchmarks they've shown indicate, it'll probably replace Luna in my workflows. 100k tokens is a pretty low threshold before the price goes up, but I tend to use these smaller models for smaller tasks anyway.”

  Hacker News · frustration