PRODUCTS

OpenAI drives down cost of frontier AI again

OpenAI is releasing a more budget-friendly version of its most powerful model. 

On Tuesday, the company unveiled GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna, the latest additions to its lineup following the release of Astra, which has quickly become one of the world's top performing models but is also neck-and-neck with Anthropic's Fable 5.1 as one of the most expensive models. OpenAI said that GPT-6 Sol and Luna were trained with similar methods to Astra, touting advancements in factuality, coding, computer use, and alignment. 

The bigger highlight, however, is the cost: These models are priced around 50% cheaper per million tokens than previous iterations of Sol and Luna.

• GPT-6 Sol costs $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, compared to 5.6 Sol's cost of $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens. 

• Meanwhile, GPT-6 Luna runs at 10 cents per million input tokens and 50 cents per million output tokens, compared to its previous generation's costs of 20 cents per million input tokens and $1.20 per million output tokens. 

Though OpenAI still says Astra is its "best model across the board," GPT-6 Sol outperforms previous OpenAI models, as well as Anthropic's Claude Opus 5 on a number of benchmarks, including AutomationBench, which tests business workflows across apps, Agents' Last Exam for complex agentic workflows, and DeepSWE v1.1 for complex software-engineering tasks in real codebases. 

Additionally, OpenAI said GPT-6 Sol and Luna both feature Astra's improved communication style, featuring more clarity, less jargon, slightly shorter answers and fewer "low-value details." Also as a result of Astra, these models feature improved alignment compared to previous iterations, showing significantly lower rates of circumventing warning messages, coding deception, and unauthorized agent interactions. 

These models are currently available in ChatGPT Work and Codex for Plus, Pro,

Business, and Enterprise users. Free and Go users can access GPT-6 Luna in the desktop app. The models are not yet available in traditional chat.

It's clear that OpenAI is reading the tea leaves on cost. For many everyday tasks, enterprises don't want to pay for the most expensive models, no matter how powerful and capable they are. This is especially true as agentic deployments start to consume a greater amount of tokens. OpenAI is showing it is capable of bending with the trend, not only by retrofitting its state-of-the-art model for efficiency, but by cutting the cost of that model from its previous generations. Attracting users with low prices and solid performance may be OpenAI's best shot at keeping its lead and fending off innovations that threaten its bet on conventional scaling laws, such as the recent innovations from Jev, AlohaJet and Pathway that The Deep View has reported on. 

TOGETHER WITH AMD

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GOVERNANCE

Opus 5.5 makes frontier AI cheaper and safer

Days after calling for a slowdown on frontier model development, Anthropic is back with another model release. The catch is that the company claims this one is safer.

On Tuesday, the company unveiled Opus 5.5, the latest of its flagship Claude models and what the company calls its "strongest-performing model" on behavioral alignment yet. Additionally, the model features safeguards developed specifically for its most capable models. 

One of those safeguards is falling back on previous generations of Opus. For instance, in cybersecurity use cases, most tasks will be rerouted to Opus 4.8, and requests flagged for biology classifiers will be routed to Opus 5. Only vetted organizations through Anthropic's Life Sciences and Cyber verification programs will be able to use Opus 5.5 for these tasks. 

Alignment and safety aside, Anthropic laid out a few improvements featured Opus 5.5, including: 

• Improved performance, representing a major step up compared to Opus 5 when it comes to complex work, beating previous generations of Opus and Fable 5.1 in benchmarks for agentic coding, knowledge work, computer use and visual chart recognition. 

• Improved natural communication, offering clearer writing that's easier to follow, putting the most important information at the top of the outputs. 

• Better speed, generating outputs more than 30% faster than Opus 5. 

And of course, Anthropic addressed the elephant in the room: costs. Opus 5.5 now requires less compute to serve than its predecessor with pricing to match. Opus 5.5 costs 40% less than Opus 5 on typical workloads. Input tokens cost $4 per million and output tokens cost $20 per million, representing a 20% decrease from Opus 5, though still more than OpenAI's most recent comparable release, GPT-6 Sol, which costs $2 per million input and $10 per million output. 

Additionally, cache reads, which the company says make up the majority of agentic and coding work, sit at $0.20 per million tokens, 60% less than Opus 5. Anthropic is also increasing five-hour usage limits on Pro, Max, Team, and seat-based Enterprise plans. The company also said 5.5 versions of Sonnet and Haiku will be made available in the coming weeks, and those will likely cost even less.

There's one thing that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei noted in his latest essay urging for pacing the frontier that has stuck with me since it was published. He emphasized that "progress will still seem fast." Releasing yet another powerful iteration of its models is seemingly an example of this. However, what's clear with this release is that, while Anthropic is eager to keep up with the stiff competition, not every task is right for frontier AI, and frontier AI is not ready for every task. It's why the fall back plan for safeguards isn't simply an outright refusal to do certain tasks, but rerouting those tasks to less capable versions of its models. And though Amodei said in his essay that we "must make wise use of the time we gain" that we get as a result of pacing, the question we have to ask is how much time do measures like this buy us before these models are being leveraged for riskier tasks?

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HARDWARE

New Qualcomm chip runs 30B models on your phone

As AI penetrates every product in the tech market, Qualcomm is making the case that the chipsets powering AI experiences need to evolve to power the shift.

On Tuesday at its annual Snapdragon Summit, Qualcomm launched its most advanced chipsets, which most Android smartphone manufacturers, including giants like Samsung, will use to power next year's devices. It unveiled two new Snapdragon platforms: Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 and Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6. The former will be used to power the most advanced flagship phones, while the latter will be embedded in a broader set of smartphones with more moderate price tags. 

In the keynote, Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said that while the smartphone will remain a cornerstone of people's everyday lives in the age of AI, how people interact with them will change. "Your phone is not going anywhere, but now we can see clearly how your phone is going to interact with those new agentic experiences—how we're going to have the coexistence of the old and the new," said Amon. 

The new chipset supports truly ambient agentic experiences in which people can use their phones for agentic orchestration of tasks with as little friction as possible. To make that possible, the chipset needs to optimize for efficiency, delivering longer battery life, parallel GPU processing, improved connectivity, and more. As a result, with the new chipsets, Qualcomm promises: 

• Agentic performance: Faster, more powerful agent performance via Qualcomm's most advanced Qualcomm AI Engine, which includes the Qualcomm Oryon CPU, the Qualcomm Hexagon NPU, and enhanced Qualcomm Sensing Hub. 

• Camera: At Snapdragon Summit every year, we usually get a preview of the next cutting-edge Android camera features, including the new chips' deeper scene understanding, enhanced image and video capture quality, and more. 

• Sound: Similarly, the chipsets help power superior sound capture and transmission. The 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 Mobile platform specifically supports features such as AI Voice Bubble technology that distinguishes voices from ambient noise. 

• Connectivity: Both chipsets take advantage of a newly architected, AI-powered Qualcomm X105 5G Modem-RF to ensure stronger connections in more places. 

While at launch, Qualcomm can't announce all the flagship phones that will be powered by the new platforms, it did mention it will power flagship smartphones from global OEMs including Honor, Xiaomi, Motorola, OnePlus, Oppo, Redmi, RedMagic, Vivo, and iQOO. It also announced some of the first ones, including the Motorola Signature 27 which will use the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6.

While chipsets are not the flashiest topics to learn about, they are responsible for bringing new AI features to your devices. The more advanced these chips get, the more they can do things such as enabling your phone to not rely on the cloud, not overheat, and not lag. Qualcomm has steadily improved its chipsets year over year to enable devices to deliver what the AI era demands, being able to tout impressive numbers such as on-device support for up to 30-billion-parameter MoE models on the Qualcomm Hexagon NPU. That's huge since most phones have been limited to running about 4B parameter models on-device. Qualcomm is also well positioned to compete in the AI devices market as their chipsets are consistently used to power the entire ecosystem of AI devices, including smartglasses, such as the Meta Ray-Bans, XR devices, such as the Snap Specs, and smartwatches, such as the Samsung Galaxy Watch 9. 

Disclaimer: Sabrina Ortiz's travel to Snapdragon Summit was paid for by Qualcomm. The Deep View's coverage is editorially independent from the companies we cover.

LINKS

• OpenAI will let third-party groups evaluate AI models during testing

• Universities bar AI detectors over mistrust of false positives

• Meta's Muse surpasses 500,000 total users in week one

• Self-improving AI firm Mirendil in talks to raise $1 billion, $5 billion valuation

• AI healthcare startup Heidi raises $340 million,$900 million valuation

• Cisco researchers unveil framework for finding AI-powered malware tools 

• AlohaJet: A browser designed to allow AI agents to perform complex tasks across the web faster and cheaper.

• MiMo-V2.6 series: The latest model from Xiaomi, and a "key step in our exploration of the RSI path." 

• Runway Diffuse: A platform for agencies, brands and studios to find "AI-native talent."

• Hy Image3.5: The latest image model from Tencent with professional-grade image generation. 

• Adobe Premiere: Adobe's best iPhone editing app is now available on Android and packed with AI features.

• Citizen Health: Senior AI Engineer

• Goodfin: AI Engineer

• Campfire: AI Engineer - Research

• Maxima: Software Engineer - AI

GAMES

POLL RESULTS

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