Or incentivize using the minimum viable model for the job instead of throwing multi trillion parameter Fable sized models at summarizing documents or classification tasks.

I now do like 90% of my routine software dev/sysadmin stuff with Luna on Medium by default, some proportion of which could itself be offloaded to a small Qwen model.

But I wonder if that offloading will happen if prices rise past a certain point and it becomes not worth it.

Economic theory would state that if token prices go up people will stop offloading work onto LLMs and start doing it themselves again.

Indeed, 2026 was basically that: the LLM providers increased token costs and companies cut LLM spend to the bone. That is why Anthropic's IPO is struggling and MS and Google have failed to meet AI-related revenue targets for 3 straight years.