Comment by benjiro29

Why does an open weights model cost nearly the same as GPT5.6? $1.14 vs $1.23 on the cost index.

What cost the most in API. Input, Cached Input, or Output. There you have your answer.

Unfortunately, we have moved so much of the actual intelligence of models towards reasoning, what results in some models getting good scores, but this is because they are dumping a insane amount of reasoning tokens at the problem.

So a mid priced model, with heavy reasoning output, cost the same as a expensive model, with medium reasoning output.

Before the GPT Luna price drop of 80%, you actually had the same price if you used Luna High and Sol Low. With the difference that Sol Low was insane fast, and often way better code.

https://deepswe.datacurve.ai/

Do not look at the top score but more what is on the horizontal axis as you go down. Sol Medium is frankly, was the best performance for dollar, until that Luna price drop. I will even argue that despite the higher price, Sol Medium is still way better despite Luna Max being cheaper. Or Opus Low, one of the better values also.

What do you notice? Is that those models all have a high intelligence start point for their low setting. So that means they do not rely as much on output tokens aka thinking.