A few days changed the entire game:

• DeepSeek V4 Pro's cache-hit input price will rise from $0.003625 to as much as $0.044 per million tokens during peak hours - a 1,114% increase.

• Gemini 3.7 Flash launched at 50% below Gemini 3.6 Flash's original price. Google has temporarily extended the same promotional rate to 3.6 Flash. The discount officially expires at the end of 2026, although I suspect Google may keep it.

• One day earlier, xAI showed what it was capable of with Grok 4.6: near-frontier intelligence at $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens and fantastic SOTA frontier intelligence

DeepSeek's announced price increase makes it a significantly worse deal. Within a remarkably short time, Grok has emerged as a serious frontier competitor. Gemini 3.7 delivered meaningful improvements just over three weeks after 3.6 while cutting the original price in half. Yet in my view, OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Luna remains the price-performance king.

The only major lab that currently feels off the pace is Anthropic. It has confidentially filed for an IPO reportedly targeted for this fall, and some investors reportedly expect a valuation of around $2 trillion at listing. Its latest confirmed private valuation, however, was $965 billion.

For me, Opus has been a major disappointment (already mentioned that several times, but each day im shocked again how bad it is), and that frustration is echoed by many of the people I speak with. Sonnet 5, meanwhile, doesn't look like a compelling mid-tier price-performance competitor against the latest alternatives.

A few days changed the entire game.