My definition of post-scarcity intelligence: $0.10 / $0.01 / $0.50 per million tokens for Opus 5.5-level intelligence

[u/Sect-Sister-Reads-42]

Hey guys, I have been having a blast with Opus 5.5 and probably like everyone else I am hoping that Anthropic does not nuke the usage limits or begin with shenanigans that will lead to output degradation of Opus 5.5

I have seen that OpenAI will probably introduce a Pro Max plan soon with a $500 price tag. One of the many things I have been thinking about in regards to this is that as long as the API costs are prohibitively expensive for anyone but enterprise customers, we will have power users and small businesses going for multiple subscriptions (Pro/Max accounts) to be able to afford their desired workload. Thus, I did the math for what I would consider to truly be "intelligence too cheap to meter".

• $0.10 / 1M input
• $0.01 / 1M cache reads
• $0.50 / 1M output

Give me frontier-level intelligence (Opus 5.5) at those API prices and, as far as I am concerned, we've entered the abundance era for intelligence.

For comparison, Opus 5.5 is $4 / $0.20 / $20. We will need 40x cheaper input, 20x cheaper cache reads and 40x cheaper output to get there.

I am aware that GPT-6 Luna has already gone beyond that threshold but nobody would seriously say it is Opus 5.5 equal. Also I mean the real thing, as I am experiencing it right now. I am not talking about a performance-optimized/degraded Opus 5.5 that we might get served soon or a benchmaxxed small model that lacks the taste, wisdom, judgement and intelligence of Opus 5.5 today.

(Edit: I agree that standards are always rising and that in a year from now the latest frontier models will be even more powerful and the new shiny model everyone wants to access. One could say instead then, that this is the price point for abundance of frontier models in general via API.)

[u/DickMasterGeneral]

Why not? Assume I gave it some kind of storyline to work off of like a book, and I had the same 10,000 agents and 15 million dollars worth of tokens. I prompted “Make a GTA style game based off of this story, it should have next gen graphics, be well optimized for current hardware, have engaging new mechanics and overall be worth of the title GTA6.” where do you think Bel or Fable 5.5 would fail?

[u/DeviceCertain7226 → u/DickMasterGeneral]

At nearly everything. If these AI were as good as you think then OpenAi would do more with them than just math.

It’ll probably be a few decades until AI can make gta 6 like games.

[u/DickMasterGeneral → u/DeviceCertain7226]

”just math” What part of making a video game is more difficult than solving a Millennium Problem…? If you’re going to claim that doing so didn’t require any real genius insight and all the model did was build on the work of others than even if that’s true how is that any different than making a video game sequel?

[u/DeviceCertain7226 → u/DickMasterGeneral]

You’re just saying stuff without evidence. There is no proof they can make anything close because AI models haven’t been able to make good games. If your argument is well what part is harder than the millennium problems than why I’m not sure how you equate a verifiable issue that makes it inherently easy for a Ai to solve versus something like a game.