The small, fast LLM is gpt-oss-safeguard-20b — the efficient tier at 530 tokens/sec and $0.075 per million input tokens. It trades a few points of raw intelligence for speed and cost, the right call for high-volume, latency-sensitive work. gpt-oss-120b (free) (450 t/s) and gpt-oss-120b (450 t/s) round out the top three.
Compact, efficient models — the small/mini/flash/haiku tier — ranked by output speed. These trade a little raw intelligence for low cost and high throughput, which is the right tradeoff for chat, classification, extraction and other high-volume work.
The small, fast LLM is gpt-oss-safeguard-20b — the efficient tier at 530 tokens/sec and $0.075 per million input tokens. It trades a few points of raw intelligence for speed and cost, the right call for high-volume, latency-sensitive work. gpt-oss-120b (free) (450 t/s) and gpt-oss-120b (450 t/s) round out the top three.
gpt-oss-120b (free) (450 t/s) is the closest alternative on this metric, followed by gpt-oss-120b (450 t/s). See the full ranking above for the tradeoffs.