Opus 5.5 rerun of Karpathy's LOTR world-building burns $252 in tokens, vastly outshines Opus 5
EricBuess · x · 2026-09-26
LaytonGott reran Karpathy's Lord of the Rings world-building experiment with Opus 5.5: feed the book's first paragraph and let the model build the world for hours.
- Karpathy's original used Opus 5 capped at 1M tokens ($10) for a Three.js render
- This run had no token cap and burned through $252 worth of tokens, producing visibly far better results
Eric Buess amplified the comparison, highlighting how token budget plus model capability shape the output.
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