Better models earn just 20% more developer traffic, down from 69%
emollick · x · 2026-10-19
Per The Information, leading labs face a challenge: better models aren't attracting proportional usage. A 10-point intelligence advantage now yields only 20% more developer traffic, down from 69% in late 2025. Ethan Mollick adds that developers will be a shrinking share of total tokens per OpenAI/Anthropic internal stats, while higher-intelligence models still pay off for long-running, hard-to-verify tasks.
Related event: Model Intelligence Premium Collapses as Better LLMs No Longer Drive Usage(2 posts)→
More from Companies & People
- Stripe to showcase agentic commerce and agent wallet at Money20/20 in Vegas — jeff_weinstein · 2026-10-19
- Cloudflare's AI model ad bus and 'agentic Internet' billboard spotted in SF — threepointone · 2026-10-19
- W12 founder returns to YC: agents now write the code he once wrote by hand — ycombinator · 2026-10-19
- Astera researcher responds to paper controversy, will publish via bioRxiv and The Stacks — anshulkundaje · 2026-10-19
- Box CEO Aaron Levie: AI makes experts more powerful, not obsolete — a16z · 2026-10-19
- StepFun releases Step 5 Preview weights, hosting SF launch night Oct 22 — StepFun_ai · 2026-10-19