Yes it's a big thing that people are slowly becoming more aware of.

Nvidia models are even worse than Qwen! https://sql-benchmark.nicklothian.com/#token-efficiency-and-... (mouse over the cells for token counts and click for traces)

Gemma 4 is good for this, as AA notes:

> Gemma 4 31B is notably token efficient, using 39M output tokens to run the Intelligence Index vs 98M for Qwen3.5 27B (Reasoning). This is ~2.5x fewer output tokens for a model scoring 3 points lower. For context, the other models at the 42-point intelligence level also use significantly more tokens: MiniMax-M2.5 (56M), DeepSeek V3.2 (Reasoning, 61M), and GLM-4.7 (Reasoning, 167M)

https://artificialanalysis.ai/articles/gemma-4-everything-yo...