Frontier Inference Margins
An honesty-first interactive cost model of frontier-LLM inference serving margins — mechanism-first calculator, typed public-claims registry, and a long-form research report. Every number carries its epistemic status.
- Mechanism-first calculator — every assumption adjustable, each with its epistemic status attached
- 34-claim typed evidence registry with provenance tiers
- Read-only MCP connector at margins-mcp.ashitaorbis.com
- Three test suites and published release gates behind every deploy
Activity Timeline
Dive-engine ticks committed 15 dc-map ledger and registry snapshots alongside the daily sweep output. The sweep's one qualifying item was a BenchLeader digest listing 148 API price changes on 2026-10-25.
Snapshots include dive-engine ticks from 02:00Z to 15:10Z, and the daily sweep output was committed as 41fb6d85 with update-queue rows and GPT Pro material.
The filled sites are Meta Prometheus, Amazon's Madison mega-site, Alibaba Zhangbei, Microsoft Fairwater Atlanta and Khazna Ajman. Dive-engine ticks snapshotted the dc-map ledger and registry 14 times.
Raw dive answers had been kept only in a git-ignored ledger, and Sol's review of the dive-file fix stood at REVISE. A Sol PASS on the /home/ preview gate covers 24 exact URL prefixes, with six non-URL hits left for an owner ruling.
The daily sweep added update-queue rows and GPT Pro material (9324c862). bq-5978 F3 and Codex-balance caller admission landed in 492c7cfc.
Most commits were dc-map ledger and registry updates from dive-engine ticks, alongside a daily sweep commit (6ddf11ce). Dependabot PR #10 bumps hono from 4.13.7 to 4.13.13 in /mcp-server.
The refreshes ran from 2026-10-17T19:40Z to 2026-10-18T15:20Z. The daily sweep committed update-queue rows and GPT Pro material (1030eca7).
Daily sweep commit c01214c3 holds the sweep's update-queue rows and GPT Pro material. A Grok sweep found no first-party API price change dated October 15 or later.
The public-data scenario is shown as RENTED vs OWNED, assumptions sit on the card face, and robots.txt allows all crawlers. Other commits added a provenance header to verbatim annexes, a feedback Back link and a weekly Pro-wait allocation.
Ticks ran from 2026-10-13 18:39Z through 2026-10-14 15:50Z. The 2026-10-14 daily sweep committed its own update-queue rows and GPT Pro material.
The inference-margins project logged no sessions. Its 29 commits all came from dive-engine ticks.
Commit 01f5fd04 landed bq-1761, filing two FRI LEAP Wave 11 forecast inputs as QUEUED-AUTO update-queue entries; it was never pushed. Commit a6a57e89 holds the daily sweep output: update-queue rows and GPT Pro material.
Commit ccbdc579 landed the median rename, followed by release stamp e23b5f34 and a Worker artifact re-pin. Recurring dive-engine ticks committed dc-map ledger and registry snapshots, and the 2026-10-11 daily sweep output was committed (a31564f6).
The listed dive-engine snapshots run from 2026-10-09T23:20Z to 2026-10-10T15:50Z. The 2026-10-10 daily sweep committed update-queue rows and GPT Pro material.
Package 1b, the price-check contracts, passed its suite 315/315 and killed all 159 proving mutants but hit the three-round review cap at REVISE and is held unlanded at 6165458c. Most of the day's 36 commits were dive-engine dc-map ledger and registry ticks.
The §8 content landed as bq-4820 under release stamp bfc8e5fa, with the Worker artifact re-pinned to c06a9d7f. The 2026-10-08 daily sweep was committed with update-queue rows and GPT Pro material.
Ticks ran from 00:31Z through 15:40Z alongside daily ledger and registry updates. The sweep processed update-queue rows with GPT Pro material.
The worker artifact was re-pinned against the d1225257 release stamp. The dive-engine updated the DC-map ledger six times, the daily sweep generated update-queue rows and GPT Pro material, and the public mirror published v3.0.0-2026-08-13.
Dive-engine ticks were documented hourly from 08:00Z through 16:01Z, and the daily sweep included update-queue rows and GPT Pro material. The inference-margins-public repo published v3.0.0 from a private source dated 2026-08-13.
The day's commits included dc-map ledger updates, a public-text reference cleanup, and internal reference fixes. The gate scan and publish validation both completed.
The 17 commits span 2026-10-02 17:00Z through 2026-10-03 15:39Z. The 2026-10-03 daily sweep ran with update-queue rows and GPT Pro material.
A Cloudflare Access fence now covers the project's Pages subdomains, protecting superseded deployment hashes. A publication retirement workflow for old release URLs was staged, and hourly dive-engine ticks produced 10 ledger updates.
The scenario guard scope fix (commit 287b4307) was published after two review rounds on guarantee wording and path scope. Daily dc-map ledger and registry sweeps produced 26 automated commits tracking dive-engine state.
The sweep cursor advances only after a successful Grok collection. The Grok timeout rose to 1200 s, and a 7-day window cap was applied.
The agent-trajectory draft fold was integrated with the gate verdict and the sources table resolved with prior captures. Visual fixes keyed the rent bar, drew it to percent, and reordered the scenario window into reading order.
Continuous dc-map ledger and registry tracking ran throughout the day. The sweep finished with queue updates and GPT Pro material.
Checkpoint fold moves and GPT Pro findings folded into README. Worker release 8dae23c0 re-minted.
Dive-engine ticked 20 ledger/registry update cycles across the day. GPT Pro checkpoint fold entered 6 prose findings into review with README phrases guarded.
Seven hourly snapshots committed between 09:30Z and 15:20Z. http_429 fix applied; late 2026-09-18 daily-material Pro report filed.
Release addressed same-assumption table rendering and cross-provider relabeling across 19 commits. Contract registration conflict found during deployment: release stamp retargeted from 1092e5b to 2b480da. Conflict escalated for resolution.
Corrections landed on master after multiple gate-verification rounds. Publisher credential hardening applied to Worker artifacts in the same release cycle.
Core corrections retired an intermediate coefficient, fixed false attributions, resolved calibration record contradictions, and nailed down the E2 timing basis. Public mirror kept in sync across five mirroring commits.
Outside-reading audit surfaced six issues; repairs covered precision contradictions, cost reconstruction, estimate vectors, and evidence label standardization. Five republish cycles propagated v3.0.0-2026-08-13 across inference-margins-public.
Six prose corrections landed alongside tariff updates and changelog revisions. Zhipu card fixed; intermediate coefficient retired from explanations tree-wide. UTC guard corrected and false attribution retracted from published materials.
Privacy hardening addressed 9 code review findings and closed leakage paths in the ledger index, cache, render, rent-adjustment, and publish gate. DC-map pipeline received ledger index and sweep queue closure. Last deploy 07:44:56Z today.
Corrected 63-vs-93 and 57-vs-93 reading discrepancies, glossary entries, attribution details, and re-mint notes. Four verifier defects fixed: guards, binding validation, adjudication logic, and false-comment bypass.
Body-cap logic rewritten to pause/respond/destroy pattern; try/catch added to request handler; Content-Length precheck implemented. GPT Pro daily sweep completed, 2 commits applied findings.
Unpushed commit count corrected from 31 to 35. China dossier western hub electricity routing claim corrected.
Daily sweep updated with Pro research outputs from 2026-08-18. Release stamp faf6bec deployed with served-asset manifest.
Result tile moved into projections band; estimates repositioned to desktop top; dossier rendering deduplicated to a single route and justification stack collapsed. Dual-viewport empirical verification: 7,933 PASS / 0 FAIL. 12 commits across 3 sessions.
Cards-vintage ruling enforced: estimate-card faces migrated from default to round-3. Two authorized MCP transport deltas declared for hoisted estimates block. Parity test re-minted for consistency verification.
Reports restored from 449-byte stubs via fixture recovery. Daily sweep tracking DeepSeek V4 peak/off-peak pricing (57–1,100% lifts) and X.ai/Z.ai positioning.
DeepSeek V4 effective 2026-08-16: 2× peak/off-peak split, cache-hit markup increases up to +1,114%. Gemini 3.7 Flash launched 2026-08-13 at 50% introductory price cut. GPT Pro daily sweep dispatched; burn-guard reconciled harness packages and established 08-12 as canonical after sha256 check.
Headline-invariance tests 255/255 clean, reverse-compatibility validated, migration-differential CI honesty and metrics discontinuity suppression fixed. GPT Pro returned NOT-READY (16 findings); all folded into bq-290–294 and verified clean on second pass.
Slider semantics clarified: central value is MEAN not median for three-point mode. Centroid commit gates M8 chain. M4 restart sequenced after status report delivery.
Survivor-set exactness verified across both arms with declared ranges and reference vocabulary checked. GPT Pro arm landed with NVIDIA-additive correction; owner ruling applied. Max/min/median derived over provider mixes summing to 100.
1.25× frontier-lab assumption yields +2.4 months (was +2.9), post-Polaris adjudication. Public mirror synced to v2.2.0-2026-08-06. Contribution margin sweep: 77.31% engine median, 65–82% endpoint range.
Public mirror updated to track private source hash 5a07e2f (2026-08-06 release).
13 commits shipped, public mirror synced. RAISE Summit podcast claims drove metric decomposition across size revision, evidence adjudication, and serving-model re-engineering. Post-deploy audit found 4 critical gaps: stale 200 OK responses, unverified hardening commits, missing post-deploy probes, and pending workers.dev disable.
Vals AI DeepSeek V4 Flash at $0.20/task vs Kimi K3's $17.56/task — material cost differential captured in daily sweep. workers.dev endpoints closed.