This will be interesting. While no one cared about small models in the last few months except for the OSS community, there is a silent small model revolution with gpt luna and jev. Headless/background llm routines are cost-feasible, which will of course lead to exponential usage and cost.
My take on anthropic is that haiku 5.5 has been shelfed for a while since it is predatory against sonnet (see terra 5.6 usage), but openai went kamikaze and they are now forced to release.
Nevertheless, the elephant in the room has grown: will any of the Labs be able to profit if mass adoption lies in the highly crowded small model territory?
I don't quite understand your point here. OpenAI has a consistent history of releasing cheap/small models - first nano/mini, then luna/terra. Of course, those are now more capable than half a year ago, but I don't see a behavior change from OpenAI here.
Of course, my opinion is based on my personal experience + openrouter data that shows stickiness and low terra adoption; with openai confirming by making sol terra, astra sol.
I honestly never saw anyone doing /model gpt mini. I think those models were mostly used for copilot-like products, like those pull request reviews with untasteful dumbness to it (idiotic CodeQL finding -> LLM vomits a "fix" instead of assessing). While Luna seems to be the first model that you can trust to reason in the background, and this is predatory to their own more expensive model.
>> Claude Haiku 5.5, built for high-volume and cost-sensitive applications, will join the Claude 5.5 family in the coming weeks.