Frontier models are cheaper for agentic tasks because they require fewer turns
George Cameron · Artificial Analysis: The Independent LLM Analysis House — with George Cameron and Micah Hill-Smith · Jan 9, 2026 · at 1:09:14
George Cameron, co-founder of Artificial Analysis, explains multi-turn agent economics and turn efficiency.
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“Interestingly, in Tau Tau Two Bench Telecom, it's cheaper to run, you know, on a per token basis, more expensive models, like a GBD five, compared to some smaller open source models, because the some of the GBD five, for instance got to the answer faster. And so I was able to resolve the customer's query faster and fewer turns, and maybe it used more tokens per turn, but it certainly cost more per token. So you would always rather use GPT-V in, in, in that scenario.”
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