Software

Summary: The 30-Second Answer Yes, it is free, but metered. You get a weekly token allowance; when it runs out you wait for the reset or upgrade. Power is $20/month for 500M Muse tokens a week, Max is $100/month for 3B. No feature is behind the paywall. Paying buys volume, not capability. US only for now. Meta’s own help page says Muse “and Muse subscriptions are in limited testing and aren’t available in all locations yet.” Four ways in: iPhone, Android, the web at muse.ai, and WhatsApp. The Mac app arrived on 17 September and is a direct download from Meta, not a Mac App Store install. Glasses are “coming soon.” It does not run on your computer. Every task executes inside a dedicated Linux virtual machine in Meta’s cloud. The Mac app is the bridge that lets that remote agent reach your local Files, Mail, Messages, Calendar and Notes. It asks before anything irreversible. Sending, buying and writing to connected accounts all need your approval, and every outbound network request is gated. Meta shipped Muse on 8 September 2026 and it went to number one on the US App Store inside ten days. It is the company’s first serious productivity product, and the pitch is not “another chatbot” but an agent that finishes tasks: clears your inbox, books the trip, fills the form, places the order. ...

Summary: Gemini 3.8 Live in 30 Seconds Google promoted two voice models to general availability on September 15, 2026: gemini-3.8-live and gemini-3.8-live-extended-thinking. Both are audio-to-audio. No speech-to-text model in front, no text-to-speech engine behind. Raw audio in, raw audio out. Pricing is quoted per minute as well as per token: $0.005/min for audio input, $0.018/min for audio output. There is a free tier. The only difference between the two models is thinking. The standard one rejects thinkingLevel; Extended Thinking accepts low, medium, high. Extended Thinking takes #1 on Artificial Analysis’ Speech to Speech Quality Index at 82.6. Plain 3.8 Live sits second in the Speech Agent Arena. It auto-detects and switches between 97 languages mid-conversation. The trap: without compression, audio-only sessions cap at 15 minutes and audio-plus-video sessions at 2 minutes. Google’s September did not end with 3.8 Flash. Today, September 15, 2026, two new stable models landed on the Live side of the Gemini API: Gemini 3.8 Live and Gemini 3.8 Live Extended Thinking. ...

Summary: Five Days of Receipts Finished Portal on its own. 3,336 tool calls, roughly 21 hours, a $571.18 token bill. Launched a rocket in Factorio Space Age 2.1. No model had ever pushed past blue science before. Beat Pokémon in 18h 12m. GPT-5.6 Sol needed 96h 35m for the same run. Scored 19 out of 20 on a robot arm, at $0.94 per attempt. Produced 3,295 editable objects in Blender from a single prompt. What ties them together: every one of these has a price tag, and it is not small. The launch write-up covered the benchmark table, the pricing and the access rules. Five days on, the picture has changed: instead of OpenAI’s slides, we can now look at what people actually got the model to do. ...

Summary: Where to Find Astra Not free. Free and Go plans do not include Astra; their default model stays GPT-5.6 Luna. On Plus, Astra does not appear in regular Chat. Access arrives through ChatGPT Work and Codex. On Pro, Business and Enterprise, it shows up in the model picker under the Pro option, labelled GPT-6 Pro. The model underneath is Astra. Enterprise workspaces get it off by default at launch. An admin has to enable it. Codex CLI 0.153.0 or newer is required, and the desktop app needs updating too. In the API the model id is gpt-6-astra: 1.05M token context, 128K output, $10 in / $50 out per million tokens. Our GPT-6 Astra launch write-up covered what the model is, the benchmark table and the price tag. Two days later the question landing in the inbox is a different one: “I pay for Plus, there is no Astra anywhere in my model picker, where is it?” ...

GPT-6 Astra in 30 Seconds GPT-6 Astra is OpenAI’s new flagship, announced on September 3, 2026. The company calls it “the world’s most intelligent and aligned model”. There is no Sol/Terra/Luna split this time. The lineup is Astra and Astra Pro. API pricing is $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens: 2.5x GPT-5.6 Sol’s promotional price, and identical to Claude Fable 5.1. The scores are high but footnoted. The headline 98.6% on ARC-AGI-3 came from a custom harness; the same model scores 62.7% on the standard one. Astra is the first OpenAI model to cross the Critical cybersecurity threshold in the Preparedness Framework. Standard access refuses parts of that work outright. Rollout is staged: Daybreak enterprise customers first, then Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, the API and AWS. Pro, Business and Enterprise also get Astra Pro. OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra today, September 3, 2026. At the press briefing, president Greg Brockman first conceded that AGI remains a “gray, fuzzy thing”, then went ahead anyway: “I think it’s not unreasonable to feel that we are now in the AGI era.” He closed with the same line: “Welcome to the AGI era.” ...