I think in the long run tokens are probably the wrong thing; it's compute and cache memory that you need to be measuring, and when you look at it that way I suspect in most cases the models have pretty similar performance.
I don't need more powerful models, I need one that responds fast enough that my attention doesn't wander to other tasks. Grok 4.5 is so fast I can just use it in-band without swapping to other tasks.
Slower than Opus 4.8, which was already miserably slow, is indeed a step in the wrong direction.
During post-training of opus 5, the last few days, opus was a real wreck. I had to swap in gpt 5.6 sol for my orchestrator and enable fast mode (1.5x speed) in order for it to keep up with work and communications from a handful of mostly 5.6 sol agents.
Also because interacting with a slow orchestrator is no fun, even when plenty of work is getting done in parallel in the background.
Gemini also had modest increase before this - don't be surprised when OpenAI also has a "modest increase" with its next release. Cartel-like behaviour doesn't require direct communication when none of the participants are interested in participating in a margin-destroying price-war. All one needs to do is raise their price and watch how the competition react.
Such a scheme (and resulting high margins) would be imperilled by the existence of frontier open-weight models in the market, which may be why the reaction to Chinese models may be particularly shrill.
No I will be surprised and I'll bet on the fact that prices will keep going down, just like it went ~50% down in the latest GPT 5.6 release.
I was dividing my work between Codex and DeepSeek. Now I barely use DeepSeek, or never because Codex quota is enough after Sol
To be fair though, Sol tends to go off the rails sometimes. It's much less reliable than Fable in its outputs. It tends to be overzealous in its research/changes.