Expenditure at fixed score compares agent cost to reach the same benchmark level

soumitrashukla9 · x · 2026-07-28

This post describes expenditure at fixed score as a way to compare agent performance.

Instead of fixing the budget, you fix a target score and measure how much it costs each model to reach that level. The post notes that this is useful for comparing smaller models, but it is not the right metric when you want to push the frontier of capability.

The attached figure visualizes the idea with two curves and a shared score threshold, showing how the cheaper model reaches the same score with less expenditure.

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