Anthropic and OpenAI shipped cheaper frontier models 101 minutes apart
thursdai_pod · x · 2026-09-26
The Sep 24 ThursdAI episode rounds up a wild week in AI:
- The pace pledge lasted a week: after lab heads signed Dario's "pace the frontier" essay, Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 5.5 at 09:31 PT on Sep 22 (40% cheaper than Opus 5, cached reads cut to $0.20), and OpenAI shipped GPT-6 Sol & Luna at 11:12 the same day at half of GPT-5.6's price — 101 minutes apart. Both labs made everyday models better, not just the biggest ones.
- Price math: per token, GPT-6 Sol is half of Opus 5.5 and Luna is 40x cheaper again, but for agentic coding, cached reads dominate the bill, making Opus 5.5's 20¢ cache price potentially competitive — run your own workload.
- Also covered: Meta Connect 2026 puts Muse at the center — voice, glasses with custom wake word, a Muse Charm keychain, new VR glasses, plus a free root cloud VM for every user; Grok moves into Tesla; open source cloned Jev within a week; the episode's producer was an AI.
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