| 1 | Inference is the only frontier metric falling faster than capability is climbing. For the same medium-length prompt, Claude four Opus consumes about five watts; DeepSeek V Three consumes about twenty-three. That is a four point six times spread inside the frontier class for identical work. Carbon emissions follow: the least-efficient inference path emits more than ten times the most-efficient. Cost at constant capability falls roughly ten times per year. The implication is that model selection has become a cost-of-goods decision, not just a capability decision. Two models a single benchmark point apart can differ ten times in compute footprint at production scale. |