It's hard to not see this as a gut punch for OpenAI. They're lead was largely captured by scoring on value (by way of reset after reset) and now they're getting eaten up on price and being bestes and equalled on performance. I'll still pay a premium for Opus 5.5 right now because it's nearly unlimited use, but Google is the quiet sleeping king
Everyone is happy to watch everyone else, but I'd wager google burns more tokens through their search product than basically anyone else and now they're just quietly pacing the frontier...
Sol 6.1 scores one point less than Gemini 4 on intelligence AND costs less than half ($0.72 vs $1.99) per task.
Additionally, if you are using OpenAI you have the option to pay a bit more and get Astra which - despite the benchmarks - does outperform Sol on some things.
Also, people are - rightly - very wary of Google's benchmaxxing tendencies. I think lots of people remember Gemini 3.0 (I think?) which benchmarked amazingly, but as soon as you used it would go off-track and needed constant babysitting if you wanted to use it for agentic work.
They own their hardware. That vertical integration alone probably saves oodles because they can reconfigure to their needs as opposed to individually negotiating data centre plans. I can't imagine the complexity both OpenAI and Anthropic have to maintain for their deployments.
They may be buying it, but is there any indication they are using it for consumer-facing stuff? I would suspect given the scale there are many different things. I wish I knew more about standardization for cloud data center workloads though
I don't think the OP and your comments are mutually exclusive. If Anthropic usage is lower, and the OP considers it basically unlimited for their case, that just means that they would have virtually unlimited usage with other plans.
It's not as smart as Claude Opus 5.5 High according to the AA benchmark. Looks like a big fat nothingburger so far, though it's possible that future fine-tuned checkpoints of the same pretrained model will do a lot better.
5 points off Opus 5.5 on AA, not a good release. Falling behind and not able to catchup. Ant probably has opus 6 in the works. Fumbled so hard on this, they should have owned AI.
What a snooze fest. Another model that does not meaningfully improve on intelligence or price compared to its peers. Google has basically announced that they've "caught up" with the rest. I think they've been doing great work in the Flash department so seeing this is... underwhelming?
The only models beating it are on "max", while this is "high". There's no guarantee that those effort / reasoning levels compare, but there's almost certainly an "xhigh" or "max" version later which will score higher there.
I found that Google does not benchmaxx as much as the other providers. Of you look at real-case evaluation like lm-arena, even the 3.8 flash is often near the top despite its benchmark index being worse.
I noticed this recently with the user submitted benchmarks on Kaggle. For these obscure tests that the models haven't seen, Gemini 3.8 is often on par or beating other frontier models. Gemini is a bit shite at the game checkers though, for some weird reason it performs poorly on those benchmarks.
Note: Google can sell their tokens at cost if they really want to drive out competition, but long term they are better off by everyone making a healthy margin (and Google does a double-dip by also selling compute, services).
So, like any optimal game theory move, they are better off not starting a price war
Google is losing in the market share - their share is 0. Anthropic revenue was $60B in the last 12 months. Google is not growing the pie, it needs to buy its way to the market share and to a seat in the table.
> Argon will launch at an introductory price of $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, with cached input tokens priced at 95% off input token price.
Trading punches in the benchmarks with Mimo v2.6 and 6.1-Sol (both very cheap!), and decidedly inferior to Opus 5.5. I'm afraid this looks unimpressive. Rather comical that they're delaying its launch "for safety reasons".
From the charts, it's similar in intelligence and cost per task to both Opus 5.5 (high) and 6-Astra (max). It would be better if it were more intelligent and less expensive, but I don't see a reason to expect it to have better performance than models released around the same time.
To play the Devil's advocate, Claude loves chugging tokens, while Gemini appears to be quite a bit more conservative and efficient. I believe AA's price per task breakdown reflects this.
What are you talking about? It’s comparable to Opus 5.5 on “high” (54 vs 53; $1.82 vs $1.99), crushes every model except the most modern OAI/Ant ones, has way lower hallucination than every existing model and probably broader support for multimodal like existing Gemini models. This is so ludicrously off base.
Sol 6.1 scores one point less than Gemini 4 on intelligence AND costs less than half ($0.72 vs $1.99) per task.
Additionally, if you are using OpenAI you have the option to pay a bit more and get Astra which - despite the benchmarks - does outperform Sol on some things.
Also, people are - rightly - very wary of Google's benchmaxxing tendencies. I think lots of people remember Gemini 3.0 (I think?) which benchmarked amazingly, but as soon as you used it would go off-track and needed constant babysitting if you wanted to use it for agentic work.
the deal has a 30-day cancellation policy, and they raised a bunch of debt around the same time to fund their own datacenter expansion.
Anthropic has some of the lowest usage per $ in general, not sure what you're taking about.
Opus and Sol usage levels vs the API are currently roughly the same, but Opus 5.5 outperforms at low and medium effort levels.
If it's smart enough to do the job then it won't matter that Opus is smarter. At the right price and performance, at least.
https://imgur.com/a/h96yg5t
This is on a $20/mo paid plan :cry:
$10 per million output tokens isn't improving on frontier price?
So, like any optimal game theory move, they are better off not starting a price war
OpenAI and Anthropic are existential threats to Google and it will operate accordingly.
a) internal use b) embedding in their products c) stay abreast with capabilities
they can sit it out.
https://firstpagesage.com/reports/top-generative-ai-chatbots...
https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/16/chatgpts-market-share-slip...
The price is enticing for cost per tasks, but let's see how it goes.
I have montly (cheapy) sub to gemini models and has been underwelming and lowered the tier.
Gemini 4 Argon - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49913571
https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/ge...
1/5th the price of Astra and Fable