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Comment by chmod775 | Hacker News Reader

The more interesting finding is that it's still the second most expensive model (after Fable 5) by a long shot.

At least two models (GPT-5.6, Kimi K3) match its score (~1-2% diff) for half the cost.

The chart shows max effort, used mostly by price-insensitive enterprise users. At medium effort it drops to almost half K3’s cost, and is probably sufficient for 95% of coding tasks.

Yeah if there’s one thing that people should really understand it’s that it’s cheaper to have smarter models with less thinking than cheaper models with more thinking.

Opus medium = Sol high = 56, but still 25% more expensive

For a fair comparison, you should compare to K3 (which AA has not tested yet unfortunately) and GPT 5.6 Sol also on medium or the closest equivalent

I thought k3 medium wasn’t even available yet?

No, because Opus is smarter than those models if they’re all on medium settings. You should compare at similar levels of performance, which would be favorable to Opus.

Enterprise users are price sensitive, because they are charged per token (and have limit per user set by companies, and those limits are different from $50 per month to 1500$ per month). Subscription users might be insensitive to that.

> At medium effort it drops to almost half K3’s cost, and is probably sufficient for 95% of coding tasks.

I've also found that Kimi K3 on Max reasoning is benchmaxxing a little bit, High is probably enough for most dev work as long as you have good tooling and a good, detailed plan (which you can create on Max reasoning if you want).

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