The frontier models, compared: what they do, what they cost, which to pick.
6 articles · Updated
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.
A 70% versus 95% cache hit rate isn't the model. It's whether you set a cache_control breakpoint and keep the prefix before it byte-identical, with every dynamic value pushed into the user turn.
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.
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