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Can you say anything about how much variance is there in energy use between models and effort levels. I'm very curious about the difference between the fronteer and things like GLM 5.3 flash.

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We publish live stats comparing model energy here: https://portal.neuralwatt.com/energy-pricing though since we are ZDR we don't really have any information about what effort levels these are run at but I'll try and put together some sort of analysis. Its not entirely clear cut as higher effort certainly uses a lot more energy but you might take fewer requests to solve a task.

On a blend of about 300 agentic/coding tasks, for GLM-5.3 Flash, low was about 1.3M tok/ans, medium was ~2M tok/ans, and xhigh/max was 4.8M tok/ans. This was dominated by output tokens btw (only about a 2X input token spread, but closers to a 5X spread for output tokens from low to xhigh).

These differ by model and set of tasks, but for GLM-5.3 Flash, the best $/pass was medium effort. Max did get about 5% higher scores, but at >2X the $/pass.

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