Why it matters
Routing finally has published numbers instead of vibes. Escalating from Nemotron 3.5 Lightning up to Claude Opus 4.8 cut cost 74% against running the frontier tier alone, and the roughly 6-point accuracy cost is stated, not buried.
Tokenmaxxing read
Steal the Cognition run, not the headline: inside Devin Desktop, escalating between Kimi K2.7 and Opus 5 scored 50.6% on FrontierCode Main at $3.11 mean cost — 2.8 points off Opus 5 for about 28% less. Only 7% of LangChain's calls ever reached the frontier tier.
Source takeaway
Vendor blog, so treat the percentages as best-case: NVIDIA chose the model pairings and its own partners ran the evaluations. The durable idea is the separation of routing logic from model providers; the exact savings will not port to your workload.
