How do you know that?
In 2026 the prices have been spiking. It now costs orders of magnitude more than it did in November.
April of last year you'd get 1431 ELO[0] from o3-2025-04-16 for $8.00 per million output tokens. April of this year you can get 1436 ELO from deepseek-v4-flash for $0.2 per million output tokens.
[0]: https://huggingface.co/spaces/lmarena-ai/arena-leaderboard
I can't use last year's SOTA model when my competitors can use the current SOTA model.
This is also baked in the eye watering valuations of model companies.
Lots of people can. Tools don't need to be top of the line to be useful. Snap-on may exist, but they don't put Harbor Freight out of business.
Advanced IDEs exist but complex projects were still built in vim.
The more capable the budget models get, the lower the marginal gains from using the frontier models, even if the frontier models always stay 6 months ahead.
You can use open source models of equivalent or better capabilities for ~90% less cost...
If you kick and scream hard enough, you can always find a data point to make sure you're correct.
No one is saying that the Opus model last year costs 90% less now than it does this year.
That's not how it works.
There are better, more efficient models with equivalent capabilities that are 90% cheaper (see DeepSeek v4 Pro).
Historic trends, every 18 months, performance for the same level of quality has gone down 90%.
See: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1gpr2p4/llms_co...
And Chart 13 here: https://www.rdworldonline.com/ais-great-compression-20-chart...
And here: https://epoch.ai/data-insights/llm-inference-price-trends
The technology already exists now on the algorithmic front for the next 10x drop between everyone adopting DeepSeek's MLA, MoE (mostly already done), Medusa (a better version of Google's speculative decoding), Kimi's Attn Residuals, and Mimo's Sliding Window Attn, and (possibly) Microsoft's 1.58b (this may be a nothing burger).
Historically, algorithmic gains are only ~30% of the pie, but there's enough out there to get to 10x, with just what's available already. The other ~70% of the pie is better training data (often synthetic) and distilling frontier knowledge. There's no sign we are tapped out on that front.
> In 2026 the prices have been spiking.
That's not for the SAME level of output...
Speculative decoding usually only improves decode and sometimes actually harm prefill and for agentic coding prefill matters more.
You’re right about the rest but I need to set the record straight on these details.
Really? Care to do the math for me? Just curious about exactly how many orders of magnitude it's gone up.
