Why it matters
Model choice is hardening into a procurement decision rather than an engineering preference. Counterpoint analyst Soumen Mandal expects standard workloads to commoditize, leaving how a model is deployed — not whose badge it carries — as the differentiator.
Tokenmaxxing read
Mandal puts the spread at under $5 per million output tokens for DeepSeek or Qwen against roughly $25–$30 for GPT 5.5 and Claude Opus. OpenRouter’s Adam Swick names the shape that harvests it: plan on the expensive model, hand the routine legs to cheap ones.
Source takeaway
Analyst-sourced and worth citing, but keep the two surveys straight: the 47% China-adoption number is IDC’s 260-person panel, while the 73% routing-adoption figure comes from a separate poll of roughly 100 respondents taken late last year.
