alt Hacker News10x cheaper price per token than Claude, am I reading it right?
As long as it doesn't mean 10x worse performance, that's a good selling point.
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phildougherty • yesterday at 4:36 PM
Even if it is 10x cheaper and 2x worse it's going to eat up even more tokens spinning its wheels trying to implement things or squash bugs and you may end up spending more because of that. Or at least spending way more of your time.
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fastball • yesterday at 5:05 PM
Is it? The actual SOTA are not amazing at coding, so at least for me there is absolutely no reason to optimize on price at the moment. If I am going to use an LLM for coding it makes little sense to settle for a worse coder.
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Something like GPT 5-mini is a lot cheaper than even Haiku but when I tried it in my experience it was so bad it was a waste of time. But it’s probably still more than 1/10 the performance of Haiku probably?
In work, where my employer pays for it, Haiku tends to be the workhorse with Sonnet or Opus when I see it flailing. On my own budget I’m a lot more cost conscious, so Haiku actually ends up being “the fancy model” and minimax m2 the “dumb model”.