▲ 108 r/Overwatch
all it takes is a cat
(I found it funny on a Korean overwatch community lol)
u/AkiDenim — 12 days ago
u/AkiDenim
▲ 22 r/codex
OpenAI insists that GPT-5.5 Can get stuff done in much less tokens and thus is actually more economic than GPT-5.4, and many people might not agree.
But here's my explanation, and it kind of aligns with what I felt while I was using GPT-5.5 in a lot of coding tasks, including a large codebase, a ML project, and a physics project.
GPT-5.5 is $5/Mtok input, and $30/Mtok output. Very expensive on paper. However, the math is kind of interesting.
Usually, GPT-5.5 medium would be able to do whatever GPT-5.4 xhigh could do, but with much better coherency and it felt more natural to talk to (which is a big W, and the only reason I couldn't let go of Claude for a bit - now I'm unsubbing to Claude max yay)
However, since reasoning tokens are billed as output, when there's a LOT of reasoning going on, the economics change.
A good place to see that is in Artificial Analysis: "Cost to Run Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index" and "Verbosity". That is the amount of output tokens (and cost in total) needed to run the full evaluations themselves.
So, even when GPT-5.5 is much more expensive on paper, it's much faster (since you output less) and it's actually cheaper to get the similar intelligence results.
As you can see, GPT-5.4 xhigh used 120M output tokens to get the evaluations done, while GPT-5.5 Medium gets a similar result but does that in 22M tokens! This means that we get a big speed boost without losing too much intelligence, and it's cheaper to run comparatively to 5.4.
Well, of course, if you spam GPT-5.5 in xhigh thinking, say good bye to your wallet.. It's going to be Opus-level spendings.
But i really didn't feel the need to go high/xhigh, UNLESS I was getting the model to reason about physics and math. Physics and math is where heavy reasoning did pay off heavily. But for most work, medium thinking is *perfect*.
This also is well represented by CritPt benchmarks, where the results fluctuate in a great margin depending on reasoning level.
CritPt benchmark scores fluctuate greatly based on reasoning amounts
One more thing to keep in mind:
is that /fast mode in GPT-5.5 will take 2.5x more quota than normal, and if that compounds over using GPT-5.5 high/xhigh everywhere, your quota will be TANKED.
So if you really want to save some usage, turn off /fast mode in codex. GPT-5.5 Medium, without /fast, is still going to be faster than 5.4 xhigh or high with /fast enabled. Use the right amount of reasoning for your tasks!
I hope this helps with people suffering / experiencing the "quotas being too small". I really think that the $20 plan still offers a lot in value.
u/AkiDenim — 16 days ago