I assume it's highly use case dependent, though?
Even before the price cut seems like Sol was price competitive with Kimi
https://artificialanalysis.ai/models?models=gpt-5-6-sol-xhig...
And now it should be considerably cheaper
You cannot just look at the price tags for these models, you must eval and see the price per task. In our previous eval rounds Sol was more expensive than Opus (with its original price), took much longer, and provided worse results. Kimi does not have these issues, it's just as good as Opus with a smaller price tag.
If there's independent data showing this feel free to share a link, I haven't seen it. DeepSWE has been most closely matching what I see in my own use.
It's not always Chinese models. For example GLM 5.2 just did not work for us at all. And Gemini is still the best cheap model for non-text agents.
If you don't have a good eval set and if you don't check the models weekly, you are missing on things. And Opus 4.8 is still the absolute quality king for agentic tasks. Too bad it's so expensive.
And the clearest thing here is that Fable, Opus, and Sol are all too expensive. I'd say a healthy 75% cut to token prices and they are back in competition.
Surely you don't want them to be the reason the bubble bursts?
Well, DeepSeek just raised prices.