💻 Tom Tunguz: 84% of AI Tokens Aren't State-of-the-Art — and That's the Real Story

💻 Tom Tunguz: 84% of AI Tokens Aren't State-of-the-Art — and That's the Real Story

• Frontier models got two-thirds smarter since November and labs now ship a new model every ~36 hours — yet 84% of tokens on OpenRouter still go to non-frontier models.
• The six most-used models deliver about 77% of frontier performance at just 2.5% of flagship pricing (Claude Fable 5).
• Ramp data shows buyers are price-elastic: pricier Fable 5 generated only ~75% of the model-attributed revenue of OpenAI's priciest tier despite costing far more.
• Tunguz's read: frontier models still win on software architecture and security — but each new SOTA release must fight harder to earn its nine-figure training bill.

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