Epoch AI: GPT-5.6 latency scales quadratically with context, Claude 5 stays near-linear
dl_weekly · x · 2026-09-17
An Epoch AI report measuring time-to-first-token up to 1M-token contexts found GPT-5.6 (Terra/Sol) latency scales quadratically with prompt length, while Claude Sonnet 5 and Opus 5 scale near-linearly. This aligns with pricing differences—OpenAI doubles input pricing past 272K tokens while Claude keeps flat pricing—and suggests the two families made very different long-context architectural choices. Three noise-robust estimators confirmed the curvature gap; code and data are public.
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