タグ: llm

You do not have to pay $20/month for Perplexity Pro. Verified students and teachers pay just $10/month for the Education Pro plan (a flat 50% discount), any verified student still gets one free month on top, and US federal workers get Perplexity’s top models free with no subscription at all. The referral stack that once ran to 24 free months ended on May 31, 2026, so those are the three routes that actually work right now, and none of them involve a sketchy promo-code generator. This guide breaks down every confirmed way to get Perplexity Pro for free or cheap, exactly what each route costs, and who qualifies for it. […]

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 […]

Claude hit #1 on the App Store free chart on February 28, 2026, pushing ChatGPT out of the top spot for the first time. The catalyst was Anthropic refusing the Pentagon’s demand to strip the guardrails off Claude for autonomous weapons and mass surveillance. The administration then told federal agencies to stop buying Anthropic products, and the Defense Secretary labelled the company a “supply chain risk.” It backfired. TechCrunch reported free users up more than 60% since January and paid subscribers more than doubled over the same stretch. For how the two companies’ philosophies shape what you actually see in the chat window, we broke down how Claude and ChatGPT […]

As of August 2026, DeepSeek R2 still has not launched, and DeepSeek has never confirmed a release date. The company that shook the AI world with R1 in early 2025 spent 2026 shipping something else entirely, the DeepSeek V4 series, and on 31 July 2026 it shipped the official DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731 build with what its own model card calls substantially enhanced agentic capabilities. Its next dedicated reasoning model stayed locked behind closed doors. Reports point to founder Liang Wenfeng holding R2 back because he was not satisfied with its performance. This page tracks exactly where DeepSeek R2 stands right now, what has actually shipped versus what is still rumor, and the […]

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 landed with one clear pitch, which was 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 […]

Update, July 10, 2026: Both chatbots just moved to new flagship models. ChatGPT now runs GPT-5.6 (the Sol, Terra, and Luna tiers), which began its broad public rollout on July 9, 2026, and Grok is powered by Grok 4.5, xAI’s coding-focused release from July 8, 2026. The pricing, benchmarks, and comparison tables below reflect the new lineup. ChatGPT now runs on GPT-5.6, whose flagship Sol tier started a broad public rollout on July 9, 2026 after two weeks behind a US-government access list, while Grok is powered by Grok 4.5 (released July 8, 2026), xAI’s first model built specifically for coding and agentic work. Both chatbots have evolved fast over […]

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 […]

On June 2, 2026, at its Build developer conference, Microsoft announced a family of seven in-house AI models under the MAI brand, the most concrete step yet in the company’s plan to stop being just the best distributor of someone else’s frontier models. The lineup spans reasoning, coding, image generation, voice, and transcription, and it was unveiled during CEO Satya Nadella’s keynote alongside new agents, silicon, and a repositioning of Windows itself. The centerpiece is MAI-Thinking-1, Microsoft’s first reasoning model. It is a 35 billion active parameter Mixture of Experts model that Microsoft says matches Claude Opus 4.6 on SWE-Bench Pro and narrowly beat Claude Sonnet 4.6 in blind human […]

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.