Looking at intelligence vs cost:

- Opus 5 is 10% smarter than Grok 4.5 for 10x the cost. - Opus 5 is a bit smarter than Gpt 5.6 Sol for 2.75x the cost

ref: https://artificialanalysis.ai/?cost=intelligence-vs-cost-per...

The "current top dog" smartest model available will probably always have a premium to go after use cases where a little more intelligence is worth a lot more value.

It did far better at some tasks compared to Sol (e.g. the ARC 3 benchmark). And at those tasks, it's not just "a bit smarter": It got 30% vs less than 8% - so you're talking 2.75x more for almost 4x the coverage.

I don't think can use the AA index to say something is 10% smarter

I assume 100 is the max, meaning it's impossible to be 2x as smart as Muse Spark 1.1

As always, it requires evaluation with your work because I’m often finding grok to be much more expensive than the price would lead you to believe.

There’s also the frustration of it not quite being enough sometimes. It’s extremely capable, but I still find that it needs more concrete guidance and boundaries than other models.

That's not how intelligence works - "IQ 130 is just 7% smarter than IQ 120"

With Grok you can be sure that you're data ends up in the next model (derived or anonymized, but still).