> now look at the actual pricing history of frontier models, the ones that 99% of the demand is for at any given time:

The meaningful frontier isn't scalar on just the capability, it's on capability for a given cost. The highest capability models are not where 99% of the demand is on. Actually the opposite.

To get an idea of what point on the frontier people prefer, have a look at the OpenRouter statistics (https://openrouter.ai/rankings). Claude Opus 4 has about 1% of their total usage, not 99%. Claude Sonnet 4 is the single most popular model at about 18%. The runners up in volume are Gemini Flash 2.0 and 2.5, which are in turn significantly cheaper than Sonnet 4.

This is true. I agree with the overall premise of the article, but claiming that Opus is more used than Sonnet is just wrong.

One of the graphs even lists a "Claude 3.5 Opus", which does not exist. After 3.5 Sonnet was released, 3 Opus largely fell into irrelevance until they decided to finally release another big, expensive model with Opus 4, which still isn't anywhere near as popular as Sonnet 4 with users who pay API prices.