A model reaches a credible score at a hundredth of the frontier's price

Claim

DeepSeek's V4-Flash runs at $0.14 and $0.28 per million tokens, a hundredth of Fable 5's price, scoring 50 on the Intelligence Index, with one developer warning cautious labs will get eaten alive by open-weight models — the floor dropping faster than the ceiling rises.

Reported metric: 1/100th the price

Reporting date: 2026-08-03 (not necessarily the event date)

Sources

Attribution and reporting linked by this record; links do not imply independent verification.

• Welcome to August 3, 2026 (theinnermostloop.substack.com)