OpenAI engineer: token pricing is meaningless now — measure cost per task, not per token
hudzah · x · 2026-09-04
OpenAI engineer Steven Heidel argues per-token pricing is effectively meaningless: 3.8 Flash looks 13x cheaper per token, but Astra is cheaper per task because it's far more efficient. The takeaway: benchmark model costs per task completed, not per token — cheap tokens can still cost more overall.
More from Models
- Opus 5.5 tops OpenRouter spending in 20 of 29 task categories — mmurph · 2026-10-21
- Meta team builds open-source 30B LLM from scratch in months, hails 'second era' — TimDarcet · 2026-10-21
- DFlash drafter for Muse Glimmer-30B: 5 layers, blockwise 16-token spec decoding — TimDarcet · 2026-10-21
- EvoPress quantization shrinks 30B model from 56GB to 19GB at near-bf16 accuracy — TimDarcet · 2026-10-21
- Radar chart: Muse Glimmer-30B benchmarked against Gemma4-31B and Qwen3.6-27B — TimDarcet · 2026-10-21
- Privacy evals: Muse Glimmer-30B leaks less than Qwen3.6-27B on CIMemories — TimDarcet · 2026-10-21