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prasoon2211 | on: Outsourcing plus local AI will soon become more economical vs. frontier labs
I used to be on 5.4 high for most of my work. I have switched completely to 5.5 medium now. I would highly recommend trying it out

- 5.5 is significantly more token efficient than 5.4 - the same task takes often a third of the tokens

- because of this, is it also much faster to do the task

- you get high "intelligence" per token even after accounting for token efficiency - 5.5 medium is just under 5.4 pro levels of intelligence (imo). It has found tricky bugs for me that all other models failed at

So overall, ideally you will end up with more intelligent, faster model for slightly cheaper.

thisisembar | parent | next
This is embarrassing but I find 5.4-mini on Low covers a substantial part of my and my colleagues work.

Back when it became expensive I learned to live with it and I find my "AI skills" (mainly communication) have a substantial impact on the efficiency of the model. Not saying my work is difficult, it's not, but I find there is quite a bit of wiggle room. Smaller models can still perform useful work, but you have to do the heavy lifting yourself. It saves a ton of money.

I used to burn through 75% of my tokens in an hour or two. Now I can work all day and hit maybe 50-60% if I use it heavily.

dawnerd | parent
We trialed 5.5 and the same queries produced worse results. Not worth the cost increase. Even if there’s a token efficiency gain the higher cost wipes that out.