We notice with frontier models like Astra and Fable that one might use a lot less tokens than the other to complete the task thereby being the better deal in spite of the far higher token cost.
Even if OpenAI end up using 1 token for per task, if the token costs 1M$ , some people will find it expensive.
Astra on xhigh has a cost per task of $2.31 with an intelligence index of 53. Qwen3.8 Max has a cost per task of $5.41 with an intelligence index of 45. Pricing for GPT-6 Astra (xhigh) is $10.00 per 1M input tokens and $50.00 per 1M output tokens. Pricing for Qwen3.8 Max (0902) is $2.00 per 1M input tokens and $6.00 per 1M output tokens.
Obviously this is just one measure of all of this (and Qwen 3.8 Omni Flash isn't yet available), but I think this illustrates the point well. These relative task costs are pretty consistent across different analysts. Cost per token is arguably a useless measure at this point in most circumstances.