Quantization is a massive efficiency gain for near negligible drop in quality. If the tradeoff is quantization for an 80 percent price drop I would take that any day of the week.
> for near negligible drop in quality
Hmm, that's evidently and anecdotally wrong:
You may be right that the tradeoff is worth it, but it should be advertised as such. You shouldn't think you're paying for full o3, even if they're heavily discounting it.
I would like the option to pay for the unquantized version. For creative or story writing (D&D campaign materials and such) quantization seems to end up in much weaker word selection and phrasing. There are small semantic missteps that break the illusion the LLM understands what it's writing. I find it jarring and deeply immersion breaking. I'd prefer prototype prompts on a cheaper quantized version, but I want to be able to spend 50 cents an API call to get golden output.