Codex

Two models, one price tag: $10 per million input tokens, $50 per million output tokens. GPT-6 Astra shipped on September 3, Claude Fable 5.1 on September 1. Identical sticker prices, so the comparison looks simple. It is not. The sticker is the same, the bill is not. Run the same work through both and what you pay can double or halve depending on the shape of your workload. This post starts with where that gap comes from, then walks the benchmark table, and finishes with three concrete billing scenarios. ...

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. ...

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.” ...

Summary: DeepSeek V4 Pro in 30 Seconds DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813 went generally available on August 13, 2026. No press release, no blog post, just one line in a changelog. 1.7 trillion parameters, mixture-of-experts architecture, 1M token context, 384K token output ceiling. The weights are on Hugging Face under the MIT license. You can download them, modify them and ship them in a commercial product. Official scores are bold: 87.9 on Terminal Bench 2.1, 62.7 on DeepSWE. Independent testing is more restrained: 53 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. Pricing is $0.435 in and $0.87 out per million tokens. From August 16 the off-peak rate is half of that. The catch: its smaller sibling V4 Flash scores 52 on the same index at one third of the price. You are paying triple for one point. Model launches have settled into a ritual: a teaser video, a wall of benchmark charts, an excited founder post. DeepSeek skipped all of it. DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813 went generally available on August 13, 2026 with no announcement at all. One line landed in the API changelog and the weights appeared on Hugging Face. ...

OpenAI has announced GPT-5.5, its smartest and most intuitive model to date. Introduced as “a new class of intelligence,” it is poised to fundamentally change how we get work done on a computer. 🚀 Introducing GPT-5.5 A new class of intelligence for real work and powering agents, built to understand complex goals, use tools, check its work, and carry more tasks through to completion. It marks a new way of getting computer work done. Now available in ChatGPT and Codex. pic.twitter.com/rPLTk99ZH5 ...