The Cost Of Intelligence Isn’t Going Up, Your Expectations Are

The Cost Of Intelligence Isn’t Going Up, Your Expectations Are Did you know that GPT-5.5 is better than GPT-5.4? Sorry, let me rephrase that: Did you know GPT-5.5 with medium reasoning is a better model and uses far fewer tokens to do a task than the maxed-out GPT-5.4 xhigh? The dots on each line are GPT-5.4 and GPT-5.5 solving a complex task at no, low, medium, high, and xhigh reasoning effort. As you can see the models score higher on benchmarks while using fewer tokens. When people look at benchmarks they tend to make sweeping judgments based on a single number. SWE-Bench went up 2%, so the model’s a flop. GDPval jumped 20%, so jobs are cooked. But that’s not how people or organizations should think about model improvements. This pattern I described with GPT-5.4 and GPT-5.5 has been happening with every model for over three years now. Extrapolate that out and the amount you pay for premium intelligence on demand keeps going down, not up. Sounds like a great deal to me. Step Into A…