I still can't believe anyone in the industry measures it like:
>from under 25 minutes to over 45 minutes.
If I get my raspberry pi to run a LLM task it'll run for over 6 hours. And groq will do it in 20 seconds.
It's a gibberish measurement in itself if you don't control for token speed (and quality of output).
Tokens per second are similar across Sonnet 4.5, Opus 4.5, and Opus 4.6. More importantly, normalizing for speed isn't enough anyway because smarter models can compensate for being slower by having to output fewer tokens to get the same result. The use of 99.9p duration is a considered choice on their part to get a holistic view across model, harness, task choice, user experience level, user trust, etc.
>Tokens per second are similar across Sonnet 4.5, Opus 4.5, and Opus 4.6.
This may come as a shock, but there are LLMs not authored by anthropic and when we do measurements we may want them to be comparable across providers
The bigger gap isn't time vs tokens. It's that these metrics measure capability without measuring authorization scope. An agent that completes a 45-minute task by making unauthorized API calls isn't more autonomous, it's more dangerous. The useful measurement would be: given explicit permission boundaries, how much can the agent accomplish within those constraints? That ratio of capability-within-constraints is a better proxy for production-ready autonomy than raw task duration.
I agree time is not what we are looking for, it is maximum complexity the model can handle without failing the task, expressed in task length. Long tasks allow some slack - if you make an error you have time to see the outcomes and recover.