New frontier models the day they ship: what changed, what it costs, and whether it beats what you run now.
9 stories · Updated
The $1.77 trillion debut is the largest IPO in history. The detail that matters more sits in the prospectus: SpaceX now owns xAI, so the float quietly took Grok public, and that changes what you're betting on.
Sonnet 4.7 shipped this morning with Python execution baked directly into the API: no separate sandbox, no harness wiring, one new boolean parameter. Same model pricing as 4.6 plus a per-execution surcharge.
The Counter Brief's pricing calculator shipped without DeepSeek, Qwen, Llama, or Mistral. A reader called it out. Here's what changed, the corrected pricing, and when each non-US model is the right pick.
Your dashboard says 90% cache hits. Your bill says otherwise. The gap is almost always three specific patterns inside the system prompt that don't show up in any log, and you can fix them in an afternoon.
Google's Gemini 3.5, launched at I/O 2026, is built around a single idea: stop answering questions and start completing tasks. Here's what actually changed and why it matters.
Grok 4.3 isn't trying to top the leaderboards. It's trying to be the model you can afford to run at scale, and on that bet, it mostly delivers. Here's where it fits and where it doesn't.
We tested seven AI writing tools on the same set of tasks. Three are great, three are fine, and one is genuinely worse than nothing. Here's how they stack up.
Opus 4.8 lists at $5/MTok in and $25 out (a third of the prior Opus generation) with cache hits at $0.50. Here's what that does to the real per-request math for production teams.
A four-prompt workflow that turns a 4-hour blog post into a 75-minute one, without the soulless AI tells. Real prompts, real before/after.
A weekly read on what changed in AI. Written by people, checked twice.
Free. Unsubscribe in one click.