Inference Costs for Closed-Source Models Are Now on Par
rwang07 · x · 2026-07-19
A forwarded post compares the gap between Chinese and Western closed-source models regarding inference costs and intelligence per dollar, suggesting they are now roughly on par.
Key points include:
- Opus 4.8 is priced at about $5/$25 per million tokens, while Kimi is around $3/$15, which isn't a massive difference.
- Anthropic's 1P API gross margin is reportedly around 75%, whereas known financials from Chinese labs are closer to 50%.
- This implies that pricing differences likely stem from profit margins rather than inference efficiency gaps.
- The author also notes that training costs and efficiency are harder to gauge, and there's currently insufficient evidence to prove that Chinese labs are significantly more compute-efficient in training.
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