タグ: llm 101

OpenAI made GPT-5.6 public on July 9, 2026, and it is now the most capable ChatGPT model you can actually run. The flagship Sol tier scores 88.8% on Terminal-Bench 2.1 (and 91.9% in its Sol Ultra high-effort mode), edging GPT-5.5’s own 88.0% on the same agentic-coding test, and it ships alongside two cheaper tiers, Terra and Luna, that undercut the previous generation on price. In under a year, OpenAI has shipped seven distinct versions of GPT-5, each with its own identity and price point. If you have lost track of what separates GPT-5.0 from GPT-5.6, this guide covers every model in the family, release dates, context windows, benchmarks, pricing, and […]

On June 30, 2026, Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 5, the newest version of its balanced mid tier model and the most agentic Sonnet the company has ever shipped. It is the direct successor to Sonnet 4.6, and it lands with one clear pitch: near Opus 4.8 quality at a fraction of the cost. The headline is not a benchmark. It is the price. Sonnet 5 launches with introductory pricing of $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, cheaper than Opus 4.8, cheaper than OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, and cheaper than Google’s Gemini 3.1 Pro. For teams running agents at scale, where the same job can burn through millions […]

On June 4, 2026, NVIDIA released Nemotron 3 Ultra, a fully open 550 billion parameter reasoning model built specifically for long running agents. According to benchmark platform Artificial Analysis, it is now the most capable open model to come out of a US lab, scoring 48 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. That puts it well ahead of every other open American model and lands it in what Artificial Analysis calls the most attractive quadrant on its chart, combining high intelligence with fast output speed. Microsoft entered the in-house model race days earlier with its MAI lineup at Build. Nemotron 3 Ultra is a flagship example of open source AI […]

Claude Opus 4.8 takes the #1 spot on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index at 61.4, beating GPT-5.5. Full benchmarks, pricing, and what’s new.

Baidu released ERNIE 5.1 on May 8, 2026, hitting #4 on LMArena Search using only 6% of normal pre-training cost. We cover benchmarks, architecture, agentic performance, and how it compares to DeepSeek V4 Pro, Claude Opus 4.6, and Gemini 3.1 Pro.

DeepSeek released V4-Pro and V4-Flash on April 24, 2026, open-source MoE models with 1M context, new CSA/HCA hybrid attention, and benchmarks rivaling GPT-5.4 and Claude Opus 4.6. Full breakdown of architecture, benchmarks, pricing, and comparisons.

Update, July 10, 2026: GPT-5.5 has since been succeeded by GPT-5.6, which reached general availability on July 9, 2026 with the Sol, Terra, and Luna tiers and is now OpenAI’s frontier model. This guide remains the deep reference on GPT-5.5, which stays available as the fast Instant default across ChatGPT tiers. On April 23, 2026, OpenAI introduced GPT-5.5, its most capable model at launch and the first fully retrained base model since GPT-4.5. The release brings state-of-the-art scores on Terminal-Bench 2.0, OSWorld, and GDPval, a much stronger agentic coding profile in Codex, a new Pro tier, and a pricing step up that reflects the jump in intelligence. GPT-5.5 is rolling […]

A nameless AI model called Hunter Alpha appeared on OpenRouter, topped the leaderboards, and fooled thousands into thinking it was DeepSeek V4. It turned out to be Xiaomi’s MiMo-V2-Pro, a trillion-parameter model rivaling GPT-5.2 at a fraction of the cost.

On February 5, 2026, Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.6 — the latest and most capable model in its Claude lineup. Arriving just three months after Opus 4.5, this release brings a 1-million-token context window to the Opus family for the first time, introduces collaborative agent teams in Claude Code, and delivers benchmark results that put it ahead of GPT-5.2 and Gemini 3 Pro across most evaluations. Months later it remains a yardstick for new contenders; ByteDance’s Seed 2.1 Pro drew level with Opus 4.6 on Code Arena: Frontend, both scoring 1539. But the headline number that caught the industry’s attention wasn’t a benchmark score. It was 500 — the number […]

Update, July 2026: both models here have since been succeeded. Google has shipped Nano Banana 2 and Nano Banana 2 Pro, and OpenAI’s GPT Image line now powers ChatGPT Images 2.0. The head-to-head below is our original December 2025 test of GPT-Image-1.5 vs Nano Banana Pro, with the hands-on images generated on those versions; the takeaways on where each engine wins still hold, but for the current generation start with our Nano Banana 2 review. ByteDance has also entered the top tier with Seedream 5.0 Pro. The last twelve months have been crazy for AI, and especially for image generation: Midjourney v6, FLUX.2, Seedream 4.5, Nano Banana Pro, and GPT-Image-1.5 […]