THE TEST
SECTION 07
ISSUE 001
Task Evals Price the Whole Retry Loop
Projection: Efficiency evaluation will move beyond tokens per answer to the full cost of completed work: retries, tool calls, latency, human correction, and failure recovery. Model releases already foreground useful work with fewer output tokens. The next evaluation unit is a successful task under a declared budget, not a cheap first attempt.
Why this idea is here
What the evidence establishes.
Grok 4.5 and GPT-5.6 are positioned around useful agentic work with fewer output tokens. The broader retry, latency, correction, and recovery scorecard is an editorial inference rather than a demonstrated market standard.
Source ledger
Read the sources.
- S01Introducing Grok 4.5
official model release / published 2026-07-08 / retrieved 2026-07-09
- S02GPT-5.6: Frontier intelligence that scales with your ambition
official model release / published 2026-07-09 / retrieved 2026-07-10