---
title: "Quality knee — where paying more stops buying quality — Undominated"
canonical: https://undominated.ai/ko/knee/
description: "First frontier step past 10× the running median $/point: Gemini 3.7 Flash → Claude Opus 5 (as of 2026-08-28)."
---

# Quality knee — where paying more stops buying quality — Undominated

> First frontier step past 10× the running median $/point: Gemini 3.7 Flash → Claude Opus 5 (as of 2026-08-28).

# Quality knee

Where paying more on the frontier stops buying quality at a defensible rate. The rule is in data/knee.toml , not in a chart.

As of 2026-08-28, the first frontier step whose $/intelligence-point exceeds **10×** the running median of prior steps is Gemini 3.7 Flash → Claude Opus 5 at $0.66/pt (threshold $0.08/pt). Condition: standard-delivery Pareto frontier on Artificial Analysis intelligence, balanced workload — evaluation lens while AA licence is unresolved.

Definition source: docs/PRODUCT-SPEC.md. Left of the knee: commodity quality. Right: premium quality.

| From | To | $/pt | Δq |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Solar Pro 4 | Qwen3 30B A3B Instruct 2507 | 0.004 | +8.1 |
| Qwen3 30B A3B Instruct 2507 | DeepSeek V4 Flash 0423 | 0.000 | +47.3 |
| DeepSeek V4 Flash 0423 | Gemma 4 26B A4B | 0.012 | +3 |
| Gemma 4 26B A4B | Hy3 | 0.001 | +6.6 |
| Hy3 | Gemma 4 31B | 0.016 | +0.5 |
| Gemma 4 31B | MiMo-V2.5-Pro | 0.017 | +23.3 |
| MiMo-V2.5-Pro | Gemini 3.7 Flash | 0.008 | +25.2 |
| Gemini 3.7 Flash | Claude Opus 5 | 0.661 | +14 |