Openrouter model prices implying heavier quantization?

The article discusses the economic challenges of deploying large open models like GLM-5.2, particularly in relation to quantization methods and API pricing. It highlights that even with FP8 quantization, the cost per million output tokens can exceed typical API pricing, suggesting that many providers may be resorting to more aggressive quantization than assumed, which could degrade output quality. This raises concerns for practitioners about the reliability of model performance in critical applications, emphasizing the need for transparency regarding model serving stacks and quantization levels.