Sky island test: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 3 cents in 4 min vs Opus 5.5 at $4.91
On one sky-island video prompt, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 cost 3 cents and 4 minutes but produced thick fog, Gemini 4 Argon's 15-cent result ranked second best, and Opus 5.5 took 39 minutes and $4.91 for the best output.
3 cents, 15 cents, 34 cents, $4.91. One sky island, four models, one run each. The cheaper three were fast: 3 minutes for Gemini 4 Argon, 4 for DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017, 11 for Grok 4.7. Claude Opus 5.5 ran for 39 minutes and cost 182x as much as DeepSeek. At 3 cents the island spends the whole clip in thick fog. The windmill barely shows through. At 15 cents Gemini made a storybook: red-roofed windmill, smoking chimneys, a wide white waterfall, rocks floating in a purple sky. At 34 cents Grok put the village in a giant flower pot, and the waterfall pours out of its bottom. At $4.91 Opus has the most of everything: dense pines, glowing windows, a pond with a little bridge. The most expensive island is the best one. The second best cost 15 cents.