IMO the race for Latency/TPS/cost is entirely between grok and gemini flash. No model can touch them (especially for image to text related tasks), openai/anthropic seem entirely uninterested in competing for this.

grok-4-fast is a phenomenal agentic model, and gemini flash is great for deep research leaf nodes since it's so cheap, you can segment your context a lot more than you would for pro to ensure it surfaces anything that might be valuable.