Grok 4.5 Crushes Competitors in Cost Efficiency

XFreeze · x · 2026-07-18

Grok 4.5's efficiency is described as "outrageous": on Artificial Analysis's Intelligence Index tasks, it costs about $0.31 per query while still delivering frontier-level intelligence.

For comparison, Claude Fable 5 (max) costs around $2.75, Claude Opus 4.8 (max) $1.80, GPT-5.6 Sol (max) $1.04, and Kimi K3 $0.95. This means Grok 4.5 is nearly 9 times cheaper than Fable 5, 6 times cheaper than Opus 4.8, and about 3 times cheaper than Kimi K3.

On FrontierSWE, it used almost 6 times fewer total tokens than Fable 5 per task, yet still ranked near the very top. The author concludes that SpaceXAI has successfully combined "high intelligence + extreme token efficiency."

Related event: Grok 4.5 draws attention for low-cost, high-efficiency performance(10 posts)→

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