alt Hacker NewsNot disagreeing with your argument, but:
> If you want a good dense model, use qwen3.6 27B instead, speed will be up, and if you don't take my word for it being smarter, take openrouter's prices of it against the bigger, slower and less memory-efficient gemma do the talking.
Don't know if this is the correct read. I think those providers are simply taking cue from Alibaba's first-party pricing for the 27B Dense. It's kinda overpriced imo. Perhaps it can be explained by how 'reasoning-inefficient' (relative to frontier models or even Gemma) the Qwen models are and longer sequence lengths are expensive to serve.
I feel like if I had the infrastructure and saw that there is a huge interest in the model, i'd just undercut alibaba's prices a little harder to grab all the consumers. I am sure that the providers have done the math and found that there is a reason not to do this (compute-bound if too many users?), but the delta is very stark, especially for output. Last I checked the cheapest 27b on openrouter was 2$ out vs 0.38$ for the 31b.
But I do agree that the openrouter prices aren't a strong signal and probably should have worded it a little better. It's just a really stark and 'in your eyes' gap.