GPT-4 at $24.7 per million tokens vs Mixtral at $0.24 - that's a 100x cost difference! Even if routing gets it wrong 20% of the time, the economics still work. But the real question is how you measure 'performance' - user satisfaction doesn't always correlate with technical metrics.
PPT (price-per-token) is insufficient to compute cost. You will also need to know an average tokens-per-interaction (TPI). They multiply to give you a cost estimate. A .01x PPT is wiped out by 100x TPI.
Are you saying that some models will take 100x more tokens than other (models in the same ballpark) for the same task? Is the 100 a real measured metric or just random numbers to illustrate a point?