$/token Is Meaningless: Opus 5 Burns 5x the Tokens of GPT 5.6
Auss_Abbood · x · 2026-08-27
The author argues that $/token is an arbitrary, meaningless way to internalize cost.
On terminal tasks at similar accuracy, Opus 5 (max) consumes roughly 5x more tokens than GPT 5.6 Sol (max) to solve similar problems.
A more meaningful metric is $/attempt measured across different task types.
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