I would love for this to be true, but this is nonsense. The local models that you can run for those prices are not as capable as current frontier. At $200 a month, it would take well over a year to break even, and that’s if you don't include energy prices and time spent tinkering to get and keep it working.
Again not the current frontier. The frontier of 6 months ago. Like opus 4.8. which is my original claim. And it's true. Even the ones that run on a single graphics card less than 3k in cost new are that good.
On some benchmarks models like Qwen 3.8 Max which cost < $6/m out cost more than Astra 6 to run at $50/m out. That’s a huge price gap and yet Astra would be cheaper if your work looks like the benchmark.
A total measured over the entire US economy without adjusting for a variety of factors including inflation and population change seems like exactly the kind of thing you would expect from a news headline. How about average or per capita?
As always, it requires evaluation with your work because I’m often finding grok to be much more expensive than the price would lead you to believe.
There’s also the frustration of it not quite being enough sometimes. It’s extremely capable, but I still find that it needs more concrete guidance and boundaries than other models.
