Language Model News

2026/10/13

  1. How much does speech-to-text cost per hour? Comparing the xAI and Mistral APIs
    PricexAIMistral
  2. Mistral Large 4 costs $1.36 in and $4.18 out, at half price for two weeks after launch
    PriceMistral
  3. Claude Managed Agents' web_fetch now fetches only URLs that already appear in the session
    How to UseAnthropic
  4. xAI's speech-to-text API costs $0.10 an hour in batch, and moved to 2.0 on 2 October
    PricexAI
  5. Claude Max and Team plans now include monthly API credits ($100 on Max 5x)
    PriceAnthropic
  6. GPT-6.1 Sol charges less than GPT-6 Sol for cached input
    ModelOpenAI
  7. Claude Sonnet 5.5 keeps Sonnet 5's price, and its cache reads were halved on 7 October
    ModelAnthropic
  8. Claude Haiku 5.5 is priced like GPT-6 Luna up to 100K tokens, and five times higher beyond
    PriceAnthropicOpenAI

2026/09/29

  1. Gemini 2.5 models are now limited to users who have used them before
    ModelGoogle
  2. Grok 4.7 joins xAI's model list at the same price and context as Grok 4.6
    ModelxAI
  3. Gemini 3.8 Live pricing: audio in at $0.005 a minute and audio out at $0.018
    PriceGoogle

2026/09/28

  1. Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS and Flash-Lite TTS prices double on 1 January 2027
    PriceGoogle
  2. Claude Opus 5.5 is $4 in and $20 out, and the model Anthropic now recommends first
    ModelAnthropic
  3. GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna: Luna costs a twentieth of Sol
    ModelOpenAI

2026/09/15

  1. DeepSeek V4.1 Flash takes over from V4 Flash at a lower price
    ModelDeepSeek
  2. Sakana AI's Fugu Ultra v2 and Fugu Max answer by routing work to other models
    ModelSakana AIOpenAI
  3. Cognition's SWE-2 is a coding model built on Kimi K3
    ModelCognitionMoonshot
  4. Inception's Mercury 2.5, a diffusion model at $0.75 per million output tokens
    PriceInceptionOpenAIAnthropic
  5. GPT-Live 1 bills by the minute, at $0.05, with the reasoning model on top
    PriceOpenAI

2026/09/08

  1. Meta sells the same model at two prices, and the cheap one is paid for with your prompts
    PriceMeta
  2. Grok 4.6 is the flagship, and it holds half the context of Grok 4.3
    ModelxAI
  3. Kimi K3 holds a million tokens at one flat rate
    ModelMoonshot
  4. The same Qwen model costs less from Beijing than from Singapore
    PriceAlibaba
  5. On Mistral, Large costs a third of Medium
    PriceMistral
  6. GPT-6 Astra and the three models that make up GPT-6
    ModelOpenAI
  7. GPT-6 Astra prices, and the 272K line that reprices the whole request
    PriceOpenAIAnthropic
  8. Claude Fable 5.1 takes the top of the lineup, and Fable 5 moves to legacy
    ModelAnthropic
  9. Cache reads on Fable 5.1 are a quarter of what they cost on Fable 5
    CostAnthropic

2026/09/02

  1. The current Claude lineup: 1M context, 128K output, retirement more than a year out
    ModelAnthropic
  2. SWE-bench Verified is at 97, and the top of the table is hard to read
    BenchmarkAnthropic
  3. A benchmark number means nothing without the conditions it was taken under
    BenchmarkAnthropicOpenAIGoogleDeepSeek
  4. Claude API prices, and the Sonnet 5 increase that did not happen
    PriceAnthropic
  5. OpenAI API prices: the GPT-5.6 line has long-context rates too
    PriceOpenAI
  6. Gemini API prices, and the two dates that change them
    PriceGoogle
  7. DeepSeek now charges double during peak hours
    PriceDeepSeek
  8. Perplexity Sonar ends on 27 September 2026, replaced by the Agent API
    PricePerplexity
  9. What prompt caching actually costs, and where the tenth does not hold
    CostOpenAIAnthropicGoogleDeepSeekxAIMetaMistralAlibabaMoonshotSakana AI
  10. Long context: who reprices the whole request, and who does not
    CostOpenAIAnthropicGooglexAIAlibabaMoonshotSakana AI
  11. Adding an MCP server to Claude Code, and which scope to pick
    How to UseAnthropic

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash takes over from V4 Flash at a lower price

ModelDeepSeek

DeepSeek released DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash on 10 September 2026⁠[1]. On the API it is called deepseek-flash⁠[2].

It is a 552B-parameter mixture-of-experts model that activates 8B parameters while reading input and 16B while writing output⁠[1,3]. It takes images as well as text⁠[1,3]. The weights are on Hugging Face under the MIT License⁠[3].

The context window is 1 million tokens, and one response can run to 384K tokens⁠[2].

With the release, V4 Flash and V4 Flash Vision Exp were retired⁠[1,2]. Requests sent under the names deepseek-v4-flash and deepseek-v4-flash-vision-exp are served by V4.1 Flash and billed at the Flash price⁠[2].

The change log says API prices were reduced along with the release⁠[4]. The new rates took effect at 04:00 UTC on 10 September⁠[1].

Per million tokens off-peak, input that hits the cache is $0.003, input that misses it is $0.15, and output is $0.60⁠[2]. From 01:00 to 04:00 and 06:00 to 10:00 UTC on weekdays the peak rate applies, and every figure doubles⁠[1,2].

The announcement said that from 04:00 UTC on 14 September every deepseek-v4-pro request would be routed to V4.1 Flash and billed at V4.1 Flash rates⁠[1].

The change log and the pricing page now say that, in response to user demand, DeepSeek will keep serving V4 Pro after 14 September with billing unchanged⁠[2,4]. V4 Pro is $0.022, $0.66 and $1.98 off-peak, and double that at peak⁠[2].

DeepSeek says V4.1 Flash scores ahead of flagship models including V4 Pro⁠[1].

Setting the two side by side at maximum reasoning effort, the model card has V4.1 Flash ahead on DeepSWE v1.1, 74.2 against 62.7, and on Terminal-Bench 2.1, 90.6 against 87.9⁠[3]. On GPQA Diamond V4 Pro is higher, at 92.4 against 90.9⁠[3].

Sources

  1. DeepSeek - DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash Release
  2. DeepSeek - Models & Pricing
  3. Hugging Face - DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash
  4. DeepSeek - Change Log