“The going rate for GLM5.2 seems to be around the $4.40/MTok mark. This is less than 20% of the retail price of Opus.”
The frontier labs bet on training a model once and printing money on inference forever. Then open-weight models showed up at 80% off with similar quality. Amortizing a billion dollars in training costs only works if nobody sells the same thing for a fifth of the price. The moat turned out to be a puddle.