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.
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