LLM Intelligence vs. Cost: Why the Log Scale Misleads You

LLMs: Intelligence vs. Cost

OpenTeams engineer Guido Imperiale argues that ArtificialAnalysis's intelligence-vs-cost plot is misleading. The log scale hides a 250x real price gap between cheap and expensive models while exaggerating trivial differences among cheap ones. He redrew three linear-scale charts, replacing official API prices with OpenRouter's cheapest third-party rates and calculating local-model cost by electricity. The charts show sharply diminishing intelligence returns per dollar above a score of 50. The post does not disclose the exact electricity cost formula.