Honestly, Who Buys SOTA?
State of the art models are two-thirds smarter than last November & labs ship two new models every three days. But 84% of tokens on OpenRouter are not state of the art. The six models carrying the supermajority deliver about 77% of frontier performance at 2.5% of Claude Fable 5's price. Ramp's data shows price elasticity in the market. Frontier models still win on software architecture & security design; application deployment optimizes a different Pareto frontier, price over performance.
