We are seeing with OpenAI, allegedly through their new pricing scheme, as intelligence and model efficiency increases they offer the same throughput while advertising 1/2 as much usage, letting Astra consume more usage, essentially only being available to those wealthy enough to afford it while still offering essentially unlimited Sol and Luna to their subscription tiers.

Also if you're cache hit rate is high enough a billion tokens tokens from Deepseek 4.1 Flash costs less than $15.

I feel like instead of releasing fable, they should have released it as Opus 5, then their next Opus release they would call Sonnet, and their next Sonnet release they would have called Haiku. I don't know if their pricing structure would have been able to support that, but Anthropic has always been the least competitive regarding token pricing.

There is overlap, but there is also a large portion of regular people that do not hold stock in oil companies.

So to bring this back to the scale of an OpenAI experiment; they can have their inference compute, host compute (I don't imagine they are hosting the compute for 12,000 agents locally in their SF office) and the office computer to interface with the experiments with the experiment connected via VLAN thru IPMI. Then the rist is agents hacking the IPMI and gaining control of the data center? I certainly don't know data center security, but those headlines would be so much worse than anything we have seen from HuggingFace. It really seems like if these AI's want to get out, they will. I want to say sandboxing autonomous agents is a difficult problem, but seemingly it is only OpenAI having these major incidents, but I don't think it's a problem that they care to truly solve. They get marketing and they get to learn a lot more about aligning their models.

The issue that OpenAI had when they had mini and nano models is that ambiguous the differences between those and everyone just used the base model anyway. I have no idea what type of job mini can do that nano couldn't or vis-à-vis.

I do wonder if it would just be better if they were named 6-small, 6, and 6-big?

I don't see your metaphor to iphones and flip phones. This new Luna model is cheaper than deepseek 4.1 flash, except for cache reads. OpenAI having to compete with China is a much larger economic-political issue that is far larger than just our AI labs.

Surely, a large part of the increase of the demand in LLMs is in their intelligence, but to hit the demand models needed to be made more efficient, and labs found that more efficient models, still demanded more usage.