While I agree directionally, I'll caveat that "cost per token" != "cost per task". In the case of Qwen3.6 it tends to think 1.6x more than Haiku, so the cost of Haiku on the same tasks tends to only be about double. More detail from comparing their Artificial Analysis metrics:
Qwen3.6-35B-A3B vs Claude Haiku 4.5
reasoning mode · AA Intelligence Index v4.0
46.0 ┤ ↖ better — cheaper · smarter · faster
│
│
44.0 ┤ ╭─────╮
│ │ ● │ Qwen3.6-35B-A3B
│ ╰─────╯
42.0 ┤
│
│
40.0 ┤
│
│
38.0 ┤ ╭───╮
│ Claude Haiku 4.5 │ ○ │
│ ╰───╯
36.0 ┤
└┬─────────┬─────────┬─────────┬─────────┬────────┬
$200 $300 $400 $500 $600 $700
x → cost to run the index (USD) lower is better
y → AA intelligence index higher is better
bubble area = output speed (tokens / sec)
╭─────╮ ╭───╮
│ ● │ Qwen ~196 t/s │ ○ │ Haiku ~93 t/s
╰─────╯ ╰───╯
┌─────────────────────┬──────────┬──────────┬───────────┐
│ model │ AA index │ run cost │ out speed │
├─────────────────────┼──────────┼──────────┼───────────┤
│ Qwen3.6-35B-A3B ●│ 43.5 │ $280 │ 196 t/s │
│ Claude Haiku 4.5 ○│ 37.1 │ $620 │ 93 t/s │
└─────────────────────┴──────────┴──────────┴───────────┘
COST PER TOKEN ≠ COST PER TASK
output tokens per index run:
Haiku 4.5 87.3M (79.3M reasoning + 8.0M answer)
Qwen3.6 143.2M (131.7M reasoning + 11.5M answer)
→ Qwen emits 1.64× more output
── output speed (tokens / sec) ────────── raw rate · higher = faster
Qwen3.6 100% ~196 t/s
Haiku 4.5 ~47% ~93 t/s
→ Qwen ~2.1× faster per token
╎ 1.64× more tokens < 2.1× faster rate
▼
── solution speed (per finished answer) ── higher = faster
Qwen3.6 100%
Haiku 4.5 ~78%
→ Qwen ~1.3× FASTER to a solution
SCORECARD
intelligence cost / task speed to solution
Qwen3.6-35B-A3B 43.5 $280 ~1.3× faster
Claude Haiku 4.5 37.1 $620 (slower)
→ Qwen wins all three. The reasoning blow-up (1.64×) is smaller than
the raw-speed edge (2.1×), so Qwen stays ahead per task.
How did you get that nicely formatted graph and table in your post ?!
> Text after a blank line that is indented by two or more spaces is formatted as code.
https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
Thanks, so in this case the value of "code fomatting" is using a fixed-width font ?
The next question is where did the "ASCII-art" graph and table come from? Are there sites to generate these?
The code formatting puts the content into a <pre> which preserves spaces, indentation and line breaks.
Just built a tool for that: https://krysoph.github.io/UnicodeData/
It is a single html file with no dependencies, it takes json data and turns into unicode charts.
Source: https://github.com/Krysoph/UnicodeData
Neat!
If I use your tool and "Copy HN-ready" and paste here then it works, but oddly if I then edit the post the formatting is lost.
Also, if I just manually post, starting with a blank line, followed by a couple of lines starting with two spaces (e.g. " aaa", " bbb"), then I'm not getting the <pre> code formatting. Any idea what I might be doing wrong?