Very strong pricing, cheaper than Grok 4.5, particularly the cached reads. We'll have to wait to see if it's actually worth using (it's not on OpenRouter yet).
You can buy the Grok plan, Cursor also has a plan which includes grok 4.5, but I don't know how subsidized they are compared to codex or claude code plans.
- Very fast, easily beats GPT 5.5/Opus 4.8/GLM 5.2 because of higher t/s (around 90?) and very high token efficiency
- Very good price, no contest vs GPT and Opus which are very overpriced if you pay API costs, and probably cheaper than GLM 5.2 when you take into account the token efficiency.
- Will take quite a while to get a feel for how smart it is, but it's definitely good, I'd say in the same tier as opus, occupying the lower end of that tier together with GLM 5.2.
I bought 2 used 3090s some years ago for $500 each. They're probably a bit more expensive now, but I guess for something like $2000 you can build a barebones 2x3090 PC which will be way faster than a Macbook. (you're fine with very basic hardware outside the GPUs)
These NVIDIA GPUs aren't general purpose in the way that you think. They can't even run games. Nvidia blackwell is probably slightly more efficient than TPUs for training. Do you really expect a 4 trillion company with the majority of its revenue being AI for some years now, not to have built its flagship product fully around AI? The GPU name stuck around, but they are pretty terrible at graphics.
The real efficiency win in these chips is that they are made for inference only. You can throw away the vast majority of a chip if you only need a few ops, a single precision (like INT8 or FP8) and don't need ultra fast interconnects.
I'm just saying it doesn't deserve such praise for being "real", because if you placed a spycam in a random steam user house it wouldn't look like that. Not that there's anything wrong with it being carefully crafted like any marketing material.