I’d love to hear from engineers who find that faster speed is a big unlock for them.
The deadline piece is really interesting. I suppose there’s a lot of people now who are basically limited by how fast their agents can run and on very aggressive timelines with funders breathing down their necks?
Note that you can't use this mode to get the most out of a subscription - they say it's always charged as extra usage:
> Fast mode usage is billed directly to extra usage, even if you have remaining usage on your plan. This means fast mode tokens do not count against your plan’s included usage and are charged at the fast mode rate from the first token.
Although if you visit the Usage screen right now, there's a deal you can claim for $50 free extra usage this month.
I’m curious what’s behind the speed improvements. It seems unlikely it’s just prioritization, so what else is changing? Is it new hardware (à la Groq or Cerebras)? That seems plausible, especially since it isn’t available on some cloud providers.
Also wondering whether we’ll soon see separate “speed” vs “cleverness” pricing on other LLM providers too.
Why does this seem unlikely? I have no doubt they are optimizing all the time, including inference speed, but why could this particular lever not entirely be driven by skipping the queue? It's an easy way to generate more money.
There are a lot of knobs they could tweak. Newer hardware and traffic prioritisation would both make a lot of sense. But they could also lower batching windows to decrease queueing time at the cost of lower throughput, or keep the KV cache in GPU memory at the expense of reducing the number of users they can serve from each GPU node.
I wonder if they might have mostly implemented this for themselves to use internally, and it is just prioritization but they don't expect too many others to pay the high cost.
While it's an excellent way to make more money in the moment, I think this might become a standard no-extra-cost feature in several months (see Opus becoming way cheaper and a default model within months). Mental load management while using agents will become even more important it seems.
Could be a use for the $50 extra usage credit. It requires extra usage to be enabled.
> Fast mode usage is billed directly to extra usage, even if you have remaining usage on your plan. This means fast mode tokens do not count against your plan’s included usage and are charged at the fast mode rate from the first token.
After exceeding the increasingly shrinking session limit with Opus 4.6, I continued with the extra usage only for a few minutes and it consumed about $10 of the credit.
I can't imagine how quickly this Fast Mode goes through credit.
Will this mean that when cost is more important than latency that replies will now take longer?
I’m not in favor of the ad model chatgpt proposes. But business models like these suffer from similar traps.
If it works for them, then the logical next step is to convert more to use fast mode. Which naturally means to slow things down for those that didn’t pick/pay for fast mode.
We’ve seen it with iPhones being slowed down to make the newer model seem faster.
Not saying it’ll happen. I love Claude. But these business models almost always invite dark patterns in order to move the bottom line.
The API price is 6x that of normal Opus, so look forward to a new $1200/mo subscription that gives you the same amount of usage if you need the extra speed.
The deadline piece is really interesting. I suppose there’s a lot of people now who are basically limited by how fast their agents can run and on very aggressive timelines with funders breathing down their necks?
> Fast mode usage is billed directly to extra usage, even if you have remaining usage on your plan. This means fast mode tokens do not count against your plan’s included usage and are charged at the fast mode rate from the first token.
Although if you visit the Usage screen right now, there's a deal you can claim for $50 free extra usage this month.
Also wondering whether we’ll soon see separate “speed” vs “cleverness” pricing on other LLM providers too.
Why does this seem unlikely? I have no doubt they are optimizing all the time, including inference speed, but why could this particular lever not entirely be driven by skipping the queue? It's an easy way to generate more money.
> codex-5.2 is really amazing but using it from my personal and not work account over the weekend taught me some user empathy lol it’s a bit slow
[0] https://nitter.net/tszzl/status/2016338961040548123
Let me guess. Quantization?
Obviously they can't make promises but I'd still like a rough indication of how much this might improve the speed of responses.
> Fast mode usage is billed directly to extra usage, even if you have remaining usage on your plan. This means fast mode tokens do not count against your plan’s included usage and are charged at the fast mode rate from the first token.
I can't imagine how quickly this Fast Mode goes through credit.
I’m not in favor of the ad model chatgpt proposes. But business models like these suffer from similar traps.
If it works for them, then the logical next step is to convert more to use fast mode. Which naturally means to slow things down for those that didn’t pick/pay for fast mode.
We’ve seen it with iPhones being slowed down to make the newer model seem faster.
Not saying it’ll happen. I love Claude. But these business models almost always invite dark patterns in order to move the bottom line.
Is the writing on the wall for $100-$200/mo users that, it's basically known-subsidized for now and $400/mo+ is coming sooner than we think?
Are they getting us all hooked and then going to raise it in the future, or will inference prices go down to offset?
Is this wrong?