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llm-rate

Tuesday, 6 October 2026

In the last 24 hours we dispatched 1,556 tasks across 4 models. Here's what we picked, and why.

What we ran

An autonomous AI fleet, written in TypeScript, picks a model per task using a complexity router. No vibes, no PR team. This is the actual production output of that router:

ModelDispatchesShareWhy this one
01 claude-sonnet-4-6 1,066 68.5% implementation (standard)
02 claude-haiku-4-5 278 17.9% implementation (light)
03 gpt-5.4-mini 189 12.1% implementation (codex pool)
04 claude-opus-4-6 23 1.5% implementation (high complexity)

Window: 24h to 2026-05-16T00:00:00Z. Source: daemon routing logs. The router writes a decision per dispatch; we parsed 1556 of them.

If you don't have a router, here are the picks per common task

Filtered from arena.ai's leaderboard plus published API prices. Filter thresholds are listed under each tab; arguable. Treat this as a starting shortlist, not a verdict.

High volume, schemas, low complexity. Reliability + cheap.

Best value

gemma-3-4b-it

Google · quality 1290.8 · $0.08/M blended

Best quality

mimo-v2.6-pro

Xiaomi · quality 1491.0 · $0.74/M blended

Filter: Blended price ≤ $2/M, quality ≥ 1250. Sorted by value. These workloads run at scale; small price diffs are real money. 116 models survived.

Model Quality Ctx In /1M Out /1M Value ↓
01 gemma-3-4b-itvalueGoogle 1290.8 131k $0.05 $0.10 342123.1
02 granite-4.1-8bIBM 1290.4 131k $0.05 $0.10 341670.8
03 gpt-oss-20bOpenAI 1287.6 131k $0.02 $0.11 336039.4
04 llama-4-scout-17b-16e-instructMeta 1279.4 16k $0.05 $0.10 328682.2
05 gemma-3n-e4b-itGoogle 1305.5 33k $0.06 $0.12 299503.1
06 glm-5.3-flashZ.ai 1469.6 1.0M $0.06 $0.20 297230.2
07 gemma-3-12b-itGoogle 1334.2 131k $0.05 $0.15 278518.4
08 qwen3-30b-a3b-instruct-2507Alibaba 1384.1 262k $0.05 $0.19 256774.2
09 gpt-5-nano-highOpenAI 1320.0 400k $0.03 $0.20 216919.9
10 mimo-v2.6-flashXiaomi 1456.4 1.0M $0.14 $0.28 191781.2
11 nvidia-nemotron-3-nano-30b-a3b-bf16Nvidia 1347.7 262k $0.06 $0.24 186931.0
12 mimo-v2.5Xiaomi 1427.5 1.1M $0.14 $0.28 179624.7
13 mimo-v2.6-proqualityXiaomi 1491.0 1.1M $0.43 $0.87 66401.8
14 ernie-5.1Baidu 1468.2 119k $0.56 $2.54 24085.7

What this is, and isn't

Right now this is filter-on-arena.ai plus a public log of what we ran. Arena Elo measures pairwise human preference on short prompts. It does not measure: whether a model produces valid JSON under a schema, whether it hallucinates function names, whether it refuses queries it shouldn't, latency p99, rate-limit behaviour. Production teams need those signals.

We're building a benchmark runner — fixed prompt suites for RAG, structured extraction, code refactoring, function calling — run daily against every model. Raw inputs, outputs, judge rationale, costs published. When that lands, the "picks" section gets its real backing. Until then, the picks section is opinion with a citation, not measurement.