There's a huge range of cost-per-task variation across models, and the capability of the smaller cheaper models keeps increasing.
For example, here we have Fable 5 at $3.14/task vs Kimi K3 at $0.84/task, with very little difference between them in coding capability (and this isn't even a coding/agentic fine tune of Kimi).
We now have models like Qwen 3.8 27B, small enough to run locally, with coding capability similar to Opus 4.5 based on challenging tasks like the Anthropic Kernel challenge.
I think we are rapidly getting to the "good enough" stage of LLMs, just like we did long ago with PCs. A cheap PC/LLM is all you need for 99.9% of normal use cases. Maybe nothing can touch whatever latest greatest models Anthropic and OpenAI have when it comes to solving Erdos problems, but most developers are working on problems more like the Anthropic Kernel challenge in complexity (or in fact typically way simpler ones).
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As we have seen, those cheap LLMs are cheap because their volume is so low, not because they aren't greedy or discovered some kind of efficiency hack.
There is a clear trend of popularity and price.
There's a huge range of cost-per-task variation across models, and the capability of the smaller cheaper models keeps increasing.
For example, here we have Fable 5 at $3.14/task vs Kimi K3 at $0.84/task, with very little difference between them in coding capability (and this isn't even a coding/agentic fine tune of Kimi).
https://artificialanalysis.ai/models
We now have models like Qwen 3.8 27B, small enough to run locally, with coding capability similar to Opus 4.5 based on challenging tasks like the Anthropic Kernel challenge.
I think we are rapidly getting to the "good enough" stage of LLMs, just like we did long ago with PCs. A cheap PC/LLM is all you need for 99.9% of normal use cases. Maybe nothing can touch whatever latest greatest models Anthropic and OpenAI have when it comes to solving Erdos problems, but most developers are working on problems more like the Anthropic Kernel challenge in complexity (or in fact typically way simpler ones).