alt Hacker News> Starting today, GPT‑5.6 Luna, our fastest and most affordable model, will cost 80% less,
I don't have the words.
I genuinely thought we were in a stage where we were plateauing and going in for 5-10% improvements over months. Seeing spikes like this makes me question about where the floor really is.
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To be fair we don't really know in terms of prices what's real and what's just investor subsidised attempts at market capture at this point. It could well be OpenAI's attempt to drown Anthropic while they've got the halo product if they feel they've got deeper pockets.
Hard to believe numbers. I don't mean that as a critique, but literally I am so impressed. Even if the model is a few percent lower for performance but is 80+% cheaper than competitors and is a US company hosted on US based hyperscaler clouds this is kind of a no brainer. Hard for most businesses to justify otherwise.
it's 80% less cost, not 80% in efficiency gains, could be that Luna was overpriced to begin with, we don't have much info on the models themselves.
Assuming the efficiency gains are real, I feel like something has to give, maybe worse quality due to aggressive quantization/kv cache compression?
5-10% over months would still be quite crazy.
But yeah I do'nt want to know what Kimi 3 is pushing buttons inside Anthropic, OpenAI and Google.
Besides any floor: For every year the tokens get faster and cheaper, we will see new things like properly working AI factories which mimic expert teams. A lot more parallism as well.
Vera Rubin will be hitting racks very soon, and this is purported to have a 10x improvement in token throughput per megawatt. Of course, old chips don't get replaced with new chips overnight, but I don't think we're anywhere near the floor yet.
They have no (other) equivalent to nano, so it makes sense that it’s much cheaper now. It may have been better, but it was also hell of a lot more expensive.
Totally possible that humans aren't actually that intelligent.
more like they were facing pressure from chinese models, and dropped prices and now their margins are squeezed
there is a ton of downward price pressure from Chinese open weight models
According to https://deepswe.datacurve.ai/, Luna at Max at it's previous cost was comparable in both performance and cost to Sol at High.
With an 80% reduction in cost that becomes a ridiculous outlier in efficiency.
> Seeing spikes like this makes me question about where the floor really is.
You mean they increased the price and then cut it back and now it is amazing?
Luna had a price hike vs mini (its previous replacement). The cut now just puts it back in that ball park.
Not that this isn't good news, but what's impressive?
Until I stop getting downvoted for asserting that these guys are profitable per token, HN is going to continue being pikau face shocked at easily predictable things that any serious AI researcher would tell you, and has been telling you for years now!!!
They over purchased hardware.
This is very likely priced below recovering the cost of the hardware but still above operating expenses.
When model intelligence reliably hits 90%-95% of current day knowledge worker tasks, they are going to burn those weight to silicon and we will see another 10X improvement in price/performance frontier.
The dynamic GPU clusters will be used for the 5% of tasks, and pushing out the frontier. Also there will be a set of knowledge tasks that are not done today (because they are too difficult for most knowledge workers), that will start being done in the future.