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nullbyte

The intelligence difference between models like DS4.1 and Sol/Opus is NOT negligible.

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The premium price is only worth fo the hardest problems.

For CRUD shoveling, models like DS4.1 are enough.

And the intelligence gap between cheap and premium is closing, as can be seen from the title of this post.

The issue is once you solve the hard problems, the lower models start messing things up that were working and reverting all fixes for the hard problems. They'll just go off and do dumb stuff.

If both DS4.1 and Opus can complete the tasks you throw at it at good enough quality the differences are negligible.

Who cares if your car can go 200mph if all you need is 60. If my requirement is 60mph, I want a faster 0-60, not a higher top speed.

Or just a cheaper way to reach 0-60

Specially if using the 200mph car when you need it is just a /model away.

A car that feels safe to be driving at 200 mph is going to feel more comfortable at 60 mph, compared to one for which 60 mph is at the very limits of its abilities. Analogies only go so far so I'm not sure there's anything to be learned from that though.

Yes, even for crud apps there's a huge variability in how nicely you can make them, and how many mistakes or footguns models make along the way. I'm very curious to what level these people are building to.

Opus 5.5: $4/$20

Deepseek 4.1: $0.02/$0.60

Just to illustrate how cheap the Corolla is in your analogy. Also Opus output would be $50 without competition.

I suspect most people in this position would be using the subscriptions, though.

A $20 Anthropic subscription is $500+ equivalent of API credit. You can build quite a lot on the $20 plan and get to use the best model.

Their API pricing has healthy margins built in.

In the Artificial Analysis index, MiMo 2.6 Pro is smarter than GPT-Sol 6.1 Low at the same cost, and only slightly dumber than Medium. MiMo 2.6 Flash is marginally cheaper and smarter than GPT-Luna 6 Max. (There is no GPT 6+ Terra, which would otherwise be in that range.) These are not negligible or trivial results.

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