You gain more benefit spending compute on post-training than on pre-training.

But scaling pre-training is still worth it if you can afford it.

I still remember gemini 1.5 ultra and gpt 4.5 as extremely strong at some areas that no benchmark capture. It was probably not economical to use them at 20 usd subscription, but they felt differently and smarter at some ways. The benchmarks seems to be missing something, because flash 3 was very close on some benchmarks to 3 pro, but much, much dumber.