Why it matters
The argument is not to use less AI but to stop overpaying for identical results. When a 40-million-token run returns what a one-million-token run would have, the gap is an architecture choice nobody made on purpose.
Tokenmaxxing read
Routing gets framed as survival rather than optimization: hardcoding an app to one provider endpoint invites breakage when models are deprecated or quietly re-tuned. Keep the huge context windows for discovery, move steady-state work onto self-hosted 2-bit models.
Source takeaway
Meta prices Muse Spark at $1.25 per million input and $4.25 per million output tokens, aimed squarely at Grok and aging GPT-4 endpoints; Qwen 36 and DeepSeek V4 Flash crowd the same niche. Judge ROI per unit of value, like cost per purchase order.
