The frontier models, compared: what they do, what they cost, which to pick.
5 articles · Updated
Gemini 3.5 Flash is GA at $1.50/$9 per million tokens (cached input $0.15): triple the Flash it replaces, 25% cheaper than 3.1 Pro, and ahead of it on coding and agentic benchmarks. What it buys.
The Counter Brief's pricing calculator shipped without DeepSeek, Qwen, Llama, or Mistral. A reader called it out. Here's what changed, the corrected pricing, and when each non-US model is the right pick.
Google's Gemini 3.5, launched at I/O 2026, is built around a single idea: stop answering questions and start completing tasks. Here's what actually changed and why it matters.
Grok 4.3 isn't trying to top the leaderboards. It's trying to be the model you can afford to run at scale, and on that bet, it mostly delivers. Here's where it fits and where it doesn't.
A 70% versus 95% cache hit rate isn't the model. It's whether you set a cache_control breakpoint and keep the prefix before it byte-identical, with every dynamic value pushed into the user turn.
The $1.77 trillion debut is the largest IPO in history. The detail that matters more sits in the prospectus: SpaceX now owns xAI, so the float quietly took Grok public, and that changes what you're betting on.
Sonnet 4.7 shipped this morning with Python execution baked directly into the API: no separate sandbox, no harness wiring, one new boolean parameter. Same model pricing as 4.6 plus a per-execution surcharge.
A weekly read on what changed in AI. Written by people, checked twice.
Free. Unsubscribe in one click.