Comment by jackdoe
3 days ago
I think there is some threshold after which "best" model doesn't matter, we are not that far from it. Fable now is really good, in a year or so, if Kimi catches up, even if Fable6 is much better, I think I will use kimi at 1/10th of the price.
I said that about opus 4.5 at the time, thinking "this is so good, in 6-12 months the Chinese models will be as good and cheap, I will use them", but I was wrong.. I pay premium for opus4.7/8 and Fable.
But at some point, it will just do the thing you want it to do, and then the race to the bottom will start.
Now that Chinese companies have access to some very good Fable tokens, I hope it speeds up the race.
Depending on who you are and how you use these models, we're already at this point
Exactly, for long running vibe coded stuff that I don't care about quality getting big and smart model is the only option. But for high quality changes where I need to have control and understand everything, where I do everything in small chunks - I can use basic model like Sonnet.
I think the next frontier for competition is speed. Instead of constantly context-switching between multiple agents that I have working on various tasks, I want a single agent that can rip through any prompt in a few seconds, so I can stay in flow on a single task.
price/token isnt the only thing relevant. if you have to ask the AI again, it'll cost you more than when it gets things right in the first place.
so better models may still be cheaper even if the price per token is higher.
yes, that is my point, but at some point, better is unmeasurable, and both the better and the not-as-good produce similar result, and then you pick the one with 1/10th of the price