Speed & Cost · sub-racePhoto finish
Time to First Token race
Seconds until the first answer token arrives, including default thinking time. Lower is better.
- Leader
- 3.5 Flash
- Margin
- 0.18s
- 33.0% ahead
- Weeks at #1
- 16
- in a row
- Changes
- 1
- in 2026
Warming up the track…
Oct 19, 20263.5 Flash leads
2025Apr ’25Jul ’25Oct ’252026Apr ’26Jul ’26Oct ’26
Score history
Top 6 today over the leader's frontier · click to jump to a week
#1 frontier3.5 FlashLlama 4gpt-ossHaiku 5.5GPT-6 LunaV4.1 Flash
Reigns at #1
Longest: 2.0 Flash, 73 weeks (from Feb 2025).
Sibling races
More speed & cost races
Why this race matters
Voice, autocomplete and chat all feel broken above a second or two.
How it is scored
Median time-to-first-answer-token at default reasoning effort.
Unit: secondsLower is betterPhoto finish under 0.24sDominant over 1.50s
Data provenance
Independent measurement of intelligence indices, speed, latency and price.
Scores here are illustrative placeholders that mimic real benchmark patterns. Swap in live data through the score provider. Methodology