There is so obviously competition in this market it’s astounding to me that people attribute all this malicious behavior to the model companies.
They’re growing over 10x a year. They want users and revenue. In order to get users and revenue, they want to provide the smartest models at affordable prices. If they unnecessarily burn tokens, users will get less value and switch.
This thread is filled with competing comments about their monopolistic power and how when one model provider was no longer doing a good job people switched to a different one.
In my experience starting with Gemini 2.5 Pro, moving to 3 and 3.1, 3.5 Flash, 3.6 Flash, and finally 3.7 Flash, 3.7 Flash is just as good if not better than 3 especially on high resolution mode (same token count per page as 3.1).
I run complicated, messy PDFs through these models. 2.5 Pro required a lot of kludgy hacks to get it to fully "see," but from 3.1 pro on I've removed many of them and haven't spotted problems.
3.7 Flash scores better than 3.1 pro on most benchmarks, leading me to believe that even if your OCR requires reasoning to interpret text or data, 3.7 Flash is probably going to be better.
Yes. I have Claude route to codex all the time as part of a dev process where fable is manager and it oversees the work of sidekicks and subagents. It’s happy to comply.
They’re growing over 10x a year. They want users and revenue. In order to get users and revenue, they want to provide the smartest models at affordable prices. If they unnecessarily burn tokens, users will get less value and switch.
This thread is filled with competing comments about their monopolistic power and how when one model provider was no longer doing a good job people switched to a different one.
The competition in this market is ferocious!