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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

#431

Post by Der_Einzige »

notatoad wrote: post #389
WarmWash wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compute is the moat. The Chinese models are cheap because no one is using them. But they can't actually afford (or have capacity) to serve enough people to kill the giants. This is evidenced by them all recently hiking prices or limiting usage. It's possible that they build out in China at an unreal pace, China doesn't have concept of "community input" to drag down state projects, but then you are left giving your IP…

Isn’t almost all of anthropic and OpenAI’s compute leased? If compute is the moat, that doesn’t really make their position any less precarious.

No one is in a better position to more efficiently use it - that's what happens when you poach every top 0.01% engineer/researcher in AI.

They're guaranteed to get over whatever hump you think they're in unironically. Uber/Tesla have been in far worse situations and despite Elon being an idiot/liar you see how they performed when even the most bullish of investors called for their heads

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

#432

Post by Der_Einzige »

mrngld wrote: post #322
dataplumb3r wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do not have a ZDR with Anthropic. For Mythos and even Fable they require prompt retention on their end. edit: or more precisely if you want to access Mythos/Fable ZDR does not apply, and depending on config the exclusion can affect other models.

I don't have experience directly with Anthropic, but I wouldn't assume anything with such high confidence without knowing the persons situation. No, an individual off the street or with an LLC and 5 employees isn't going to get a special deal from someone like Anthropic. But if their employer is bringing millions of dollars of potential spend to the table, can tell you from years of experience that turns a lot of 'no…

The three letter agencies have and will continue make sure all of those "yes's" become "no's" again, which is why the person you're trying to claim is wrong is right and you are wrong.

You do not have ZDR with fable/mythos, nor will you ever have it again. The bedrock customers who thought they had ZDR learned rather rudely that this was not the case after the government decision that also banned non US citizens from using these models.

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

#433

Post by platinumrad »

jurgenburgen wrote: post #386
platinumrad wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Those providers are VC-funded, they don’t have the leeway to pivot away from AI. I would be interested in some examples though.

I don't think the rando providers like Novita, Phala, AkashML, etc., which frequently provide discounts to compete for traffic, are VC-funded. They have to actually make money to stay afloat.

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

#434

Post by [deleted] »

wonnage wrote: post #425
perching_aix wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what they're always going to be, so not sure what would be "insane" about it. They literally feed on and emit natural language, and are put to work on informally defined, arbitrary tasks. When people figure out any reliable strategies to test and benchmark them, that's insane, and in the positive sense. This very same issue has been a thing for humans as well forever, and remains only very questionably solved…

This sounds about as unhinged as Google saying Material Design 3 is 30% more rebellious

[deleted]

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

#435

Post by solarmist »

phoghed wrote: post #418
solarmist wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As one example: Different access patterns. If you're using the app and have a subscription you get cheap tokens in the hopes you need more at which point you pay API prices which are much more expenseive.

I agree with that. However, there’s much dialogue around subsidized tokens for business use too, that people paying for the tokens are also vastly underpaying vs the “real” cost. I certainly don’t know the answer to that. Maybe the Chinese companies are also doing it. Maybe nobody is doing it. Looking at reserved capacity cost for PTUs on azure, which I think they’d probably not subsidize but can’t be sure, I’m incli…

Bulk discounts are definitely a thing. Even established businesses do that.

But the biggest discount people see is subscriptions. You get a few thousand dollars of work from a couple hundred dollars.

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

#436

Post by perching_aix »

wonnage wrote: post #425
perching_aix wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what they're always going to be, so not sure what would be "insane" about it. They literally feed on and emit natural language, and are put to work on informally defined, arbitrary tasks. When people figure out any reliable strategies to test and benchmark them, that's insane, and in the positive sense. This very same issue has been a thing for humans as well forever, and remains only very questionably solved…

This sounds about as unhinged as Google saying Material Design 3 is 30% more rebellious

Doesn't just sound like it, it is. That's life for you. That's what I'm pointing out to you. [0]

Just consider your own example. Do you think a less or more "rebellious look" is not something designers can actually ellicit? Less so in software design, sure, but in character design for example? Or general product design? Do you think e.g. Monster energy drinks are branded the way they are completely due to happenstance or something?

Except people don't usually put numbers to it, because they understand that that's hard to defend. You're the one who's describing such an idea, and wants such a thing to happen, classifying anything else as just vibes (that's the point!) and unhingedness. You're handwaving the difficulty and fundamentally limited nature of that, assuming that it is some laziness or mental delusion that's preventing it instead. You're also pretending as if it was somehow not real as a result. What I'm telling you is that you're wrong about that. Any kind of qualitative analysis that's actually defensible with these is genuinely difficult and limited in nature. See also all the opining about benchmaxxing. It also doesn't mean they're useless though, see also benchmarking.

The guy above didn't put numbers to his vibe assessment, they just drew a comparison, exactly because they know that there's not much else they can earnestly offer. You're sulking at them not lying to you by overstating their rigor, and you're flipping the arrow as if this limitation was some sort of mistake, not a necessary and intrinsic property, which it absolutely is. Natural language is an inherently subjective medium.

[0] In fancier and more mathematical terms: https://abeljansma.nl/2026/07/10/truth-is-not-a-direction.ht...

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

#437

Post by jchw »

wonnage wrote: post #419
jchw wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easy to dismiss "taste" when you either have none or just fail to appreciate it, but nothing gives you an appreciation for the importance of taste like LLMs. There is no benchmark for taste, so while many things improve taste does not. Bad taste is, in fact, a huge component of what makes AI slop so sloppy. But human coders can have bad taste too. There is code where there is nothing obviously objectively wrong,…

Thinking the giant array of GPUs has “taste” is exactly the problem

You are confusing personification, which is purely a rhetorical device, with anthropomorphization. I am not anthropomorphizing GPUs. There is nothing particularly weird about personifying model weights, as we do with computer programs, cars, and all other manner of inanimate objects every day.

To be honest, in this case, I wasn't even personifying them, because I in fact didn't say that an array of GPUs has "taste", or in fact even that model weights did. I was saying I preferred GPT 5.6 Sol's outputs as a matter of taste. I can see why someone would confuse the two statements since in this case they're pretty much the same thing, but if you re-read what I said I was actually more careful than you're giving me credit.

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

#438

Post by guntribam »

Bayart wrote: post #323
gagan2020 wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I shifted from DeepSeek v4 Flash 0731 to Gemini 3.7 flash on openrouter and price shoots up almost double with no visible change in outcome. So, today I reverted back.

Try DS through their own API if that's feasible, AFAIK they're much cheaper than through OS due to cache hit rates.

I'm using hermes and keep close control over open router provider to DSv4 flash 0731

Use only the deepseek provider, you can configure openrouter to do that(but they create some obstacles, go to configurations and allow all providers)

Right now i'm testing deepseek harness, don't wait to test it. The plugin architecture and self awareness of workflows really make you think about "what is a tool vs what is a project".

It has been an amazing experience

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

#439

Post by hatthew »

jchw wrote: post #161
hatthew wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like those examples are considered difficult because they're niche topics, but aren't actually all that difficult in a general sense. What I consider truly difficult are things like taking a ticket and implementing it in a preexisting codebase, using a clean and reasonable design that fits the existing style and makes sense to a human, and avoids the footguns I learned by working with the codebase for over a d…

If you said this in 2025 I would've 100% understood, but to be honest getting AI models to do a pretty good job on day-to-day ticket work has become so boring that we don't even bother using the top tier models and higher effort slots for that anymore. I personally wind up tweaking the results a lot and recursively having fresh agents review the diff, but that's just because I'm picky; in a lot of cases the first dif…

My experience is that current models are pretty good at making functional changes without too many more bugs than a human would make, but are still bad at making good high quality changes. I have a degree in software engineering specifically, so perhaps I am overly sensitive to design issues.

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

#440

Post by pimeys »

phoghed wrote: post #418
solarmist wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As one example: Different access patterns. If you're using the app and have a subscription you get cheap tokens in the hopes you need more at which point you pay API prices which are much more expenseive.

I agree with that. However, there’s much dialogue around subsidized tokens for business use too, that people paying for the tokens are also vastly underpaying vs the “real” cost. I certainly don’t know the answer to that. Maybe the Chinese companies are also doing it. Maybe nobody is doing it. Looking at reserved capacity cost for PTUs on azure, which I think they’d probably not subsidize but can’t be sure, I’m incli…

Wait, there's 13 providers for Kimi K3 in OpenRouter. I'm having a hard time believing every single one of them provides them without any profit.

And this one is easy to calculate: take your monthly API spend to K3, then rent a stack of 8xB300 for a month and see how much it costs. I would say you're about to save 10-15k dollars per month if you have enough traffic compared to pay per token pricing.

It's not very complex math, and the hardware of course is cheaper if you bought it last year and if you have extra GPUs waiting in your warehouse (depending on if you can produce enough energy cheaply).

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