Try the very fast models

Models are getting better. That means that the most powerful models today are much more powerful than the most powerful models of a month ago, but it also means that today's fast models today are a lot more powerful than the fast models of a month ago. Even if you pay close attention to new models,1 it's easy to focus on power at the frontier and overlook the "93% as good and super fast" model. But that's a mistake for a lot of reasons, some more obvious than others: If the fast model does something as well as the full-power model, you can save significant tokens or money by using the fast one. Your instincts about what tasks benefit from the full-power model are probably not perfect. Mine certainly aren't, and it seems to me that they're worse than they were a month or two ago. Put another way: "93% as good" is better than it used to be, and I suspect that the shape of that 93% is harder to understand and predict. Using different models to check each other's work is an important…