タグ: LLMs

Yes, Claude AI is free. You can sign up at claude.ai with no credit card and start chatting straight away, and as of July 1, 2026 the free plan runs Claude Sonnet 5, Anthropic’s newest default model. The free tier gives you roughly 15 to 40 messages every 5 hours, plus web search, file uploads, Projects, and Artifacts at no cost. So the real question is not whether Claude is free, but whether the free plan is enough for you. This guide covers exactly what the free tier includes, the message limits and how they reset, which Claude model you actually get, and when it makes sense to pay. If […]

GLM pricing is the headline reason developers keep switching to Zhipu AI’s models. The flagship GLM-5.2 costs just $1.40 per million input tokens and $4.40 per million output on the official API, roughly one-sixth of what GPT-5.5 charges, and the older GLM-4.7 is cheaper still. You can also use GLM free in the browser, and two of the models cost nothing at all through the API. This guide breaks down every way you pay for GLM in 2026: the free tier, the per-token API rates for each model, and the GLM Coding Plan subscription that starts at $18 a month. We finish with a cost comparison against Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini […]

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 […]

Meituan has open-sourced LongCat-2.0, a 1.6 trillion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts model with a native 1-million-token context window, released on June 30, 2026 under a permissive MIT license. It is the model that quietly topped global developer charts on OpenRouter for two months under the codename “Owl Alpha”, and Meituan says it is the first trillion-parameter model trained and served end-to-end on Chinese-made chips, with no Nvidia GPUs involved. This article breaks down what LongCat-2.0 actually is, how its unusual architecture keeps a 1.6T model cheap to run, what the vendor-reported benchmarks claim, and how you can try it today. We also flag where the hype outruns the evidence, because the headline numbers […]

GLM is the family of large language models built by Zhipu AI, the Chinese lab now trading as Z.ai. If you typed “what is GLM” expecting the statistics term or the Bosch laser measure, this is the other one: GLM is a direct open-weight rival to ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, and its current flagship GLM-5.2 scores high enough on independent benchmarks to sit in the same conversation as models that cost six times more to run. The reason GLM matters to you is simple. Every model in the family is open-weight and MIT-licensed, so anyone can download it, run it, or build on it for free, and the paid API […]

Most AI models people call “open source” are not actually open source. They are open-weight, a narrower thing, and the gap between the two decides what you can legally do with a model, how much you can trust it, and whether anyone could ever rebuild it. In October 2024 the Open Source Initiative finally drew a hard line with its first formal Open Source AI Definition, and by 2026 that line separates a handful of fully open models from the dozens that just look open. This guide explains what open source AI really means, why the open-weight versus open-source distinction matters to you, and which of today’s big models fall […]

ByteDance just announced Seedance 2.5, an AI video model that generates a full 30-second clip in a single pass with no stitching, breaking a limit that has held most rivals to roughly 10 to 15 seconds. The reveal came at Volcano Engine’s FORCE conference on June 23, 2026, alongside a refreshed Seedance 2.0 that now outputs native 4K with 10-bit color. This is one of the biggest jumps in AI video length so far, and it lands at a sensitive moment for ByteDance after Hollywood studios forced it to halt Seedance 2.0’s global rollout earlier this year. In this article you’ll get the full breakdown of what Seedance 2.5 does, […]

On June 22, 2026, Tokyo-based Sakana AI launched Sakana Fugu, and it works unlike almost any model you’ve used. Instead of trying to be the smartest single brain in the room, Fugu is a language model trained to command a pool of other LLMs, including copies of itself, then blend their answers into one. Its top tier, Fugu Ultra, scores 73.7 on SWE-Bench Pro, a number Sakana says puts it shoulder-to-shoulder with Anthropic’s now-pulled Fable 5 and Mythos Preview. This article breaks down what Sakana Fugu actually is and how its “model that orchestrates models” idea works in plain English. We’ll check whether the Fable 5 comparison holds up, why […]

ByteDance’s new Seed 2.1 Pro scored 1539 on Code Arena: Frontend, landing at #8 in the world and drawing level with Claude Opus 4.6. That is a remarkable result for a model that is not even publicly available yet, and it puts ByteDance into the same frontend tier as Anthropic and Z.ai for the first time. The number that matters most sits underneath that headline. Seed 2.1 Pro reached the top 10 in five of seven subcategories, and in the areas where it is strongest only a short list of frontier labs scored higher. This article breaks down exactly where the model ranks, why its React and design results stand […]

The best open source AI models now score within single digits of GPT-5.5 and Claude Opus 4.8 on most benchmarks, and you can download their weights for free. GLM 5.2 posts a 62.1 on SWE-bench Pro, DeepSeek V4 hits 80.6 on SWE-Bench Verified, and Gemma 4 runs on a laptop while scoring 85.2% on MMLU-Pro. The gap between open and closed AI has never been smaller. This guide ranks the open source AI models worth your time in 2026, what each one is genuinely best at, and how to actually run them without a rack of GPUs. We tested the picks against current benchmark data, license terms, and real accessibility, […]