In the authors’ matched evaluation, estimated generation cost per million questions fell from $359 to $98 at 4B parameters, $439 to $121 at 8B, and $470 to $176 at 14B. That is a 62.6%–72.7% reduction, although the estimate assumes $2.50 per H100-hour and 10% utilization and excludes prompt prefill, context-dependent attention, and external tool execution. The result adds cost detail to SI News’s report on Hybrid Reasoning Agents, showing that their shorter decoded trajectories could materially reduce inference expense even after latent steps are charged as full backbone passes.