People making decisions.

Pay me 8x to get 10x, great. Pay me 8x to get 3x, nope.

I have not seen reasonable claims that people are paying 8x the salary of a SWE to get those 2-3x results.

Directionally, that's why companies are getting rid of token leaderboards and imposing limits on LLM costs. There's a diminishing marginal return to tokens

That's true and it's also very easy to game.

There is increase in (not only perceived) value _somewhere_ - IMO depends on the organizational culture. At my work I found going over 100$ on OpenAI/Anthropic's API pricing does not produce any meaningful additional output. It might be much different in different companies.