What Do You Call the Middle Tier Model?

Every lab has a middle rung — Anthropic's Sonnet, OpenAI's Sol, Google's Flash, Mistral's Medium — but there's no agreed name for it, and the price lists have quietly converged into a ladder. This episode digs into why the tier most people use all day is getting squeezed by cheap open-weight models below and flagship promotions above. It's a conversation about cost per finished task rather than cost per token, why effort settings can matter more than the tier name, and what "the middle" even means when last year's flagship keeps becoming this year's workhorse. Episode 6216 — myweirdprompts.com/n/6216 (permanent short link: myweirdprompts.com/487534) Listen on Android: MWP FM Player — myweirdprompts.com/apk