It is not so much a drop in quality as there are tasks that every model above a certain threshold will perform equally. Most can do 2+2 = 4. One test prompt I

It is not so much a drop in quality as there are tasks that every model above a certain threshold will perform equally. Most can do 2+2 = 4. One test prompt I use on LLMs is asking it to produce a JavaScript function that takes an ImageData object and returns a new ImageData object with an all direction Sobel edge detection. Quite a lot of even quite small models can generate functions like this. In general, I don't even think this is a question that needs to be answered. A lot of API providers have different quality/price tiers. The fact that people are using the different tiers should be sufficient to show that at least some people are finding cases where cheaper models are good enough.