Max Reasoning Effort Nearly Doubles Cost for Minimal Gains: Opus 5.5 xhigh Matches Sonnet 5.5 max at Half Price
randal_olson · x · 2026-10-07
Max reasoning effort can nearly double cost for minimal Intelligence Index gains, per a new chart comparison. Opus 5.5 at xhigh roughly matches Sonnet 5.5 at max for less than half the cost. The author suggests comparing models before maxing out, and built the chart with evident-charts, his open source skill for explanatory charts.
Related event: Max Reasoning Effort Nearly Doubles Cost for Minimal Gains(2 posts)→
More from Models
- Western labs less likely to distill from Claude but more likely from GLM 5.3 — andrew_n_carr · 2026-10-07
- With OpenAI's Luna, cloud beats open weights on price — at least GPUs heat the house — BLUECOW009 · 2026-10-07
- V4.1 Flash review: top of Flash tier but wild hallucination swings, tester wary of V4.1 Pro — teortaxesTex · 2026-10-07
- OpenAI Launches Decisions API in Public Beta, Up to 10x Faster Than GPT-6 Luna — stevenheidel · 2026-10-07
- OpenAI to watermark ChatGPT outputs by default in the EU under AI Act — Ars Technica AI · 2026-10-07
- Mistral trained ML4 on 3,800 Grace Blackwell GPUs in its European datacenter, more clusters coming — rakyll · 2026-10-07