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Agentic AI, SLMs, and Why Models Above US$0.50 Output per 1M Tokens Are Equivalent to Burning Money
June 2026. If you are still paying more than fifty cents per million output tokens in any agentic pipeline, forgive my frankness: you are literally burning money. No, this is not an exaggeration on my part, but simply the relationship between API costs and absurd usage — because, indeed, LLMs should be used absurdly, whether you are a solo researcher like me or a startup. And here, the reason has a name, surname, and version: DeepSeek V4 Flash. And what it represents goes far beyond excellent benchmark results — it represents the consolidation of a trend that demonetizes the already psychologically consolidated commercial models and pushes the center of gravity toward SLMs, the highly specialized Small Language Models. ...