Comment by cbg0
20 hours ago
For less than 10% bump across the benchmarks? Probably not, but if your employer is paying (which is probably what OAI is counting on) it's all good.
It's kind of starting to make sense that they doubled the usage on Pro plans - if the usage drains twice as fast on 5.5 after that promo is over a lot of people on the $100 plan might have to upgrade.
You are paying per token, but what you care about is token efficiency. If token efficiency has improved by as much as they claim it did (i.e. you need less tokens to complete a task successfully) all seems well.
Not for coding because it actually needs to read and write large files
Well, sort of. Imagine the case where it first scans the repo, then "intelligently" creates architecture files describing the project. The level of intelligence will create a varying quality of summary, with varying need of deep-scans on subsequent sessions. Level of intelligence will also increase comprehension of these architecture files.
Same principle applies when designing plans for complex tasks, etc. Token amount to grasp a concept is what matters.
Tbf, I have not super kept track of what is actually happening inside the "thinking" portion of recent releases. But last time I checked there still was a lot of verbosity and mistakes, that beat the actual amount of required, usable code generation by a wide margin.
If it uses half the tokens to complete a task, then doubling the cost is perfectly fine. But is that actually true?
This happens with every new model release though. The model makes less mistakes and spends less time fixing them, resulting in a token usage reduction for the same difficulty of task. Almost any task other than straight boilerplate will benefit from this.
In the same vein, I would guess that Opus 4.7 is probably cheaper for most tasks than 4.6, even though the tokenizer uses more tokens for the same length of string.
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We'll find out!