What's this about?
An analysis plotting model intelligence against cost — the frontier of what you can buy per dollar.
Why is that plot the important one right now?
Because absolute capability has stopped being the binding constraint for most work, and price has become one. This week alone: Gemini 3.8 Flash claims frontier-adjacent performance at Flash pricing, Fable 5.1 got 25% cheaper while burning quota faster, and FrontierHarness showed a 17× cost spread from the harness alone. The useful question is no longer "which model is best" but "what is the cheapest thing that clears the bar for this task", and that requires exactly this plot.
Why is it worth noticing?
HN 70 points, 38 comments
- It is the framing every other cost item in today's digest is an instance of.
- Pareto-frontier thinking is the same argument the small-models post made two weeks ago.
- These analyses go stale in weeks, which is itself the point.