It also depends on how many tokens it needs to burn through to accomplish something.

At this point, I always look at things like Artificial Analysis' total cost to run their tests. It'll take into consideration the cost of tokens, how many tokens it burns through, and how effectively it uses caching (and the price of that caching).

If a model "costs the same" but its reasoning ends up going through a ton more tokens, it doesn't really cost the same in real world usage.

Tokenizers define the alphabet on which the language model is trained. I don't want people to get the impression it's a module which can be swapped out or modified on its own. Alphabet size is a design consideration related to correctly encoding the training data.

With that kind of pricing, I don't think they're competing with GLM with this new launch.

I believe Kimi is spending more on marketing than GLM (a lot of ads lately) so I guess that's part of what the higher price supposed to cover.

GLM is actually quite expensive in actual practice because it's not very token efficient. I've yet to find a way to run it on a monthly sub reliably for cheaper than Codex.

Neuralwatt was cheap (but slow) but they cranked their price.

Ollama monthly sub is speedy but doesn't offer a lot of quota.

Right now unless you're paying by the token, there's no cost based reason to use the open weight models for daily coding work because the monthly coding plans from Anthropic and OpenAI are a better deal.