Strangely enough, my first test with Sonnet 4.6 via the API for a relatively simple request was more expensive ($0.11) than my average request to Opus 4.6 (~$0.07), because it used way more tokens than what I would consider necessary for the prompt.
This is an interesting trend with recent models. The smarter ones get away with a lot less thinking tokens, partially to fully negating the speed/price advantage of the smaller models.
Opus is supposed to be the expensive-but-quality one, while Sonnet is the cheaper one.
So if you don't want to pay the significant premium for Opus, it seems like you can just wait a few weeks till Sonnet catches up
Strangely enough, my first test with Sonnet 4.6 via the API for a relatively simple request was more expensive ($0.11) than my average request to Opus 4.6 (~$0.07), because it used way more tokens than what I would consider necessary for the prompt.
This is an interesting trend with recent models. The smarter ones get away with a lot less thinking tokens, partially to fully negating the speed/price advantage of the smaller models.
Okay, thanks. Hard to keep all these names apart.
I'm even surprised people pay more money for some models than others.
Because Opus 4.5 was released like a month ago and state of the art, and now the significantly faster and cheaper version is already comparable.
"Faster" is also a good point. I'm using different models via GitHub copilot and find the better, more accurate models way to slow.
Opus 4.5 was November, but your point stands.
Fair. Feels like a month!
It means price has decreased by 3 times in a few months.
Because Opus 4.5 inference is/was more expensive.