AI Models

Meta Muse is Meta's personal AI agent app, launched 8 Sept 2026 on Muse Spark 1.3. What it does, how the Secure VM and Sentinel work, pricing, Muse for Mac, Muse Connectors, privacy, and how it compares with Claude Cowork and Gemini Spark.

Xiaomi's MiMo-V2.6-Pro is the new top open-weight model: 1.02T/42B MoE, 1M context, MIT licence, AA Index 46, $0.435/$0.87 API. Specs, benchmarks, hardware, comparison with Kimi K3, Qwen 3.8 Max, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash and GLM-5.3.

Claude Opus 5.5 (claude-opus-5-5): $4/$20 per MTok, 1M context, medium default effort. Fast mode went GA on 15 Oct 2026 at $8/$40 with no beta header, on the Claude API, Foundry and Anthropic-managed Google Cloud. Benchmarks, Artificial Analysis #1 at 58 and per-effort costs.

Opus 5.5 leads AA at 58 ($5.98/task; 54 for $1.82 at high). Gemini 4 Argon (53, $1.62) wins DeepSWE v1.1 77.9% but trails Terminal-Bench 4.0 57.4% vs 66.4%, and doubles to $4/$20 on Dec 1. Astra $10/$50, Grok 4.7 $2/$6 at 46.

DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 (17 Oct 2026): same deepseek-flash ID and $0.30/$1.20 peak pricing, Terminal-Bench 4.0 up from 31.2 to 42.3, AA index 45 (was 39), 16% fewer output tokens. Plus Search & Fetch at $0.75/1K, the Oct 15 outage credits, V4-Pro status and Unsloth GGUFs.

GPT-6 Astra beats GPT-5.6 Sol by 5.7 points on Artificial Analysis's Intelligence Index v4.3.2 (52.67 vs 46.97 at max effort) and costs 64% more per task. But Sol is now deprecated on AA, and GPT-6.1 Sol reaches 51.83 for $0.72 a task.

GPT-6 Astra lists at exactly twice Claude Opus 5. On the one independent same-harness index that has run both, Opus 5 scores higher. Here is the full cost and benchmark breakdown.

OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra on 3 September 2026. Verified specification table, OpenAI-reported vs independently measured benchmarks, the 272K pricing cliff, staged rollout, and the API migration gotchas.

GPT-6 Astra and Claude Fable 5.1 launched two days apart at identical $10/$50 pricing. We check the verified benchmarks and run the real cost arithmetic on caching and long context.

Two different products share the name Astra. GPT-6 Astra is OpenAI's new flagship model; Google Project Astra is a DeepMind research prototype whose features ship inside Gemini Live. Here is the side-by-side.

Every Qwen 3.8 variant in one table: 27B, Flash-Next, 2.4T-A95B and Max, with params, context, licence and price, plus a single rule for picking one.

Alibaba's cheap multimodal tier: $0.15/$0.47 per 1M tokens, 1M context, and open weights under the Qwen Community License. Specs, benchmarks and how it compares to GLM-5.3-Flash and DeepSeek V4-Flash.

Haiku 5.5 and GPT-6 Luna share the lowest input rate ($0.10/$0.50, below their price cliffs); Qwen 3.8 Flash is cheaper blended. Luna is cheapest per Artificial Analysis task ($0.07); DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 scores highest on the AA Intelligence Index (45).

Muse Spark 1.3 costs exactly what 1.2 costs, with the same 1M context and the same API. So the upgrade is a pure quality call. Here are the verified benchmark deltas, the documented audio regression, and the Contributor-tier trade-off.

Meta's Muse Spark 1.3 shipped on 2 September 2026 with the same specs and price as 1.2 — plus a Contributor tier that is up to 21x cheaper because Meta trains on your prompts and completions. Full specs, benchmarks, pricing comparison and the exact documented terms.

Fable 5.1 leads every head-to-head benchmark but costs 2x on list. Its cache reads are half Opus 5's, which flips the cost answer for cache-heavy agentic workloads.

Claude Fable 5.1 ships at the same $10/$50 price as Fable 5 — but cache reads drop 4x to $0.25/MTok, agentic benchmarks jump sharply, and forced tool_choice now returns a 400 error. A full head-to-head with the caching arithmetic and a clear switch/don't-switch rule.

Since Oct 8, 2026, gemini-3.7-flash requests are served by Gemini 3.8 Flash and gemini-3.5-flash by 3.6 Flash. Both cost $0.75/$3.75 per 1M tokens until Dec 31, then $1.50/$7.50. What the reroute changes, a re-test checklist, and when to pick Gemini 4 Argon.

Anthropic released Claude Fable 5.1 on 1 September 2026 at the same $10/$50 price as Fable 5. The real change is a 4x cut to cache reads, plus a breaking change to forced tool use.

Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.7 Flash share identical pricing, context and parameters. We compare verified benchmarks from Artificial Analysis, LMArena and Google to answer whether the upgrade is worth it.

GLM-5.3-Flash is 320B-A18B, multimodal and roughly 9x cheaper than GLM-5.2's 744B-A40B. A verified head-to-head on specs, benchmarks, cost and self-hosting — plus the cases where GLM-5.2 still wins.

Z.ai's GLM-5.3-Flash is the model that ran anonymously as Ox Alpha: a 320B-total, 18B-active natively multimodal MoE with a 1M-token context and MIT open weights. Here are the verified specs, pricing and benchmarks.

Ox Alpha was Z.ai's GLM-5.3-Flash, confirmed on 26 August 2026. The free stealth preview has ended and the OpenRouter listing is gone. Verified specs, MIT-licensed weights, real pricing, and how to use the model now.

Verified Grok 4.6 API and subscription pricing as of 23 August 2026 - the $2/$6 token rates, the 200K long-context cliff, per-call tool fees, and worked cost examples.