The narrative has definitely shifted this week with US mainstream media now aware of what was being said in this thread; lots of attention on token cost optimization and switching to cheaper models.
Some other examples:
AI harness startup (Droid) announces a smart model routing product to reduce costs
Legal AI startup Harvey saw significant cost reductions routing most tasks to GLM 5.1. Was also able to surpass frontier models by fine tuning GLM directly, reinforcing my previous point that fine-tuned open weight models will surpass US closed models for domain specific cases.
Former OpenAI expert interview says many of his clients have switched to open weight models. Chinese model released in April (ie. DeepSeek v4 and Kimi K2.6) have seen vast improvements in quality making them very competitive.