The Cheapest Model Is Now Too Good to Ignore

For most of my work, the price gap matters more than the leaderboard.

I benchmarked my daily tasks across a few models and the pricey one won maybe a third of them.

For summarizing, tagging, and drafting, a cheap model is indistinguishable to the end user.

The leaderboard says otherwise, but the leaderboard isn't my inbox at 11pm.

I route by task now: cheap for volume, expensive for the few calls where quality shows.

Paying top dollar for a classification is the new waste, and the market is pricing that out as we speak.

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