Comment by ComputerGuru

People in HN live in a bubble. Plenty of real world use cannot use subscription plans (not even talking about enterprise agentic use) and is absolutely at the mercy of the cost per task metric.

We agonize over cost per task to the extreme for services/functionality built atop of APIs and can absolutely guarantee you that it is the real world metric that counts most right after “is the model good enough for the task at hand,” and furthermore that, yes, in fact, it is quite often that we see certain models/providers easily using 3x or more tokens on average for the same tasks (or even the exact same task) than a supposedly similarly matched model from another provider. Once you become intimately familiar with the thinking traces from specific models, you can preempt this to some extent with manipulations to the system prompt (essentially heading off entire thinking branches) but the nuking of reasoning traces in the name of preventing against distillation attacks has made this harder.