Large Language Models

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.” ...

TL;DR: Gemini 3.8 Flash in 30 seconds Gemini 3.8 Flash landed on September 2, 2026, three weeks after 3.7 Flash. That is the third Flash release in three months. Price did not move: $0.75 input, $3.75 output per million tokens. The promo ends December 31, 2026, then it doubles. A second model shipped alongside it: Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber, tuned for vulnerability discovery and locked behind the new Fairwind Program. The benchmark table is split. It tops the chart on finance, legal, long video and chart reasoning, and it trails Claude Opus 5 badly on long horizon terminal and computer use work. The model “works harder”: more reasoning steps, more iterative tool calls. Same sticker price, potentially a bigger bill. The Flash release cadence has stopped being funny. 3.6 Flash shipped on July 21, 3.7 Flash on August 13, and Gemini 3.8 Flash today, September 2, 2026. Three releases in three months. ...

Summary: Gemini 3.7 Flash in 30 Seconds Gemini 3.7 Flash landed on August 13, 2026, only three weeks after 3.6 Flash. Introductory pricing is $0.75 in / $3.75 out per 1M tokens: half of 3.6 Flash’s standard rate. The promo ends December 31, 2026. Coding jumped hard: FrontierCode 1.1 went from 34.4% to 43.6%, DeepSWE v1.1 from 48.6% to 65.3%. Context window is 1,048,576 tokens with a 65,536 token output cap. It takes text, images, video, audio and PDF. It is not the smartest model on the board: 56 on the Artificial Analysis index, one point behind GPT-5.6 Terra and Muse Spark 1.2, at roughly a third of their price. Google’s Flash line has never been about winning the intelligence crown. It is the model you run at volume: cheap enough to call thousands of times a day, fast enough to sit inside a product. Gemini 3.7 Flash stretches that definition. ...

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. ...

Summary: Grok 4.6 in 30 Seconds Grok 4.6 is SpaceXAI’s new flagship model, announced on August 12, 2026. It is a post-training upgrade on the Grok 4.5 base, not a new foundation model. It scores 61 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index: five points above Grok 4.5 from a month ago, level with GPT-5.6 Sol, two points behind Claude Opus 5. Pricing did not move: $2 per 1M input tokens and $6 per 1M output. Roughly half what rivals charge. A new reasoning tier arrived: xhigh. The model also checks and verifies its own work far more often. The context window is 500K tokens, but any request above 200K doubles the price of the whole call. In the AI race, a month is a long time. In early July we were writing about Grok 4.5. Five weeks later SpaceXAI announced Grok 4.6 and put the model straight back into the frontier conversation. ...