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GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50% on OpenRouter

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Re: GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50% on OpenRouter

#391
post #183

This sure looks like a race to the bottom to me, and I love it. If Sol isn't the best model, it is up there... You don't cut the price of the best model for no reason...

> This sure looks like a race to the bottom Always has been. My prediction is that both OpenAI and Claude will go bust unless they deliver a killer product. And unlike scrappy startups, they have a pretty serious deadline because creditors will come a-knockin'. There's little to no functional difference between Kimi, Qwen, Sol, Opus, etc. All flagship models are within like 1-5% of each other and the real moat will b…

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Re: GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50% on OpenRouter

#393

This sure looks like a race to the bottom to me, and I love it. If Sol isn't the best model, it is up there... You don't cut the price of the best model for no reason...

If you believe https://artificialanalysis.ai/ This is basically undercutting KimiK3 and Grok 4.6 where previously utilised gad soke advantages but was a step more expensive

The Offline test ranking of Tracking AI lines up much better with my experience of using the models.

https://trackingai.org/home

Re: GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50% on OpenRouter

#394
post #278

The competition is real in pricing. Thanks for the Chinese open models, US big players have to cut their inference pricing. We've done a bunch of evals between the models, and Kimi K3 was the first one that actually could compete or be even better than Opus or Sol in our use cases, with a fraction of the price. All our developers use K3 as their programming model, and it now powers a big part of our systems instead o…

It's funny how quickly we went from "the greedy US companies are subsidizing prices to keep competitors out of the market" to "the greedy US companies are overcharging because they are greedy."

Both can be true simultaneously. American companies were comfortable with a high cost structure because it padded their revenue numbers. The government tried to block out competitors through import/export controls, and it ended up backfiring by creating more efficient competitors. Very similar to our competition with Japan in the 80s. We'll see if we give the AI labs the kinds of sweetheart protectionism that US car makers got.

Re: GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50% on OpenRouter

#395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Immoral my ass. Is any amount of tokenmaxxing moral?

Is any form of energy usage moral?

Only for plants, those weird bacteria that live near thermal vents, and maybe the tardigrade.

Re: GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50% on OpenRouter

#396
post #278

The competition is real in pricing. Thanks for the Chinese open models, US big players have to cut their inference pricing. We've done a bunch of evals between the models, and Kimi K3 was the first one that actually could compete or be even better than Opus or Sol in our use cases, with a fraction of the price. All our developers use K3 as their programming model, and it now powers a big part of our systems instead o…

Not including Grok/Cursor seems a major flaw in your model

Re: GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50% on OpenRouter

#397

This is the opening salvos of an all out token price war. With models a commodity at this point there isn’t much leverage for the big labs to keep their pricing anywhere near where it’s at. And that’s at the worst possible time as they need to be dramatically raising prices to have a viable business model. Expect pricing to rapidly fall towards the underlying cost of compute and as players get really desperate we’ll…

> The AI bubble is just waiting for the first player to scream mercy and cut capex as they simply can’t afford to throw more cash on the burning pile. That will be the trigger that implodes this bubble

Deepseek v4 and Kimi k3 have tightened the screws on the frontier models. With open-weights, anyone can host these for cost of compute. So, there is zero leverage left for the frontier labs.

What implodes it in my view is that enterprise adoption will stall. Enterprises are struggling to actually use these things in real workflows outside of coding and support.

Re: GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50% on OpenRouter

#398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny how quickly we went from "the greedy US companies are subsidizing prices to keep competitors out of the market" to "the greedy US companies are overcharging because they are greedy."

Both can be true simultaneously. American companies were comfortable with a high cost structure because it padded their revenue numbers. The government tried to block out competitors through import/export controls, and it ended up backfiring by creating more efficient competitors. Very similar to our competition with Japan in the 80s. We'll see if we give the AI labs the kinds of sweetheart protectionism that US car…

Can you explain better how OpenAI, for example, would simultaneously subsidize tokens while overcharging for them? Not sure I get it.

Re: GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50% on OpenRouter

#399
post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think both can be true - they're losing money on the API and they're still charging too much. Which is really where the music stops for American AI investment. I also use K3 now and its perfectly capable for the development work I'm doing. I don't shed any tears for OpenAI or Anthropic.

API are not subsidized. We know this is true from the existence of independent inference providers (a lot of which are crypto companies that would otherwise just be mining if inference weren't actually profitable).

Any public company providing inference who’s claimed its profitability in a way they risk legal penalties if untrue?

(Makes sense to me, just curious about this additional piece.)

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