Opus 5.5, Sol, Grok 4.7: Four Price Cuts, No Yardstick

Opus 5.5, Sol, Grok 4.7: Four Price Cuts, No Yardstick

Four companies cut the cost of completing an AI task inside a single cycle: Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 at a claimed 40% lower running cost than Opus 5, OpenAI's Sol and Luna at roughly half the prior GPT-5.6 generation's API price, xAI's Grok 4.7 priced at a fraction of both, and TypeSafe AI's Jev attacking the problem from underneath by replacing the model entirely for routine yes/no decisions. The axis of competition appears to be moving from which model is smartest to which one finishes the job cheapest — but every figure is vendor-reported and measured against that vendor's own prior release, so nothing available today lets a buyer compare the four directly. The episode also covers AI assistants moving off the chat screen and into cars, laptops, phone silicon, voice and recommendation feeds; Meta's Muse breaking download records while absorbing a zero-day disclosure and privacy criticism; the US data center power shortfall showing up simultaneously in the grid, in California law, in Trump's political base and in Michael Burry's short book; and three incompatible institutional proposals on AI pacing from the White House, Congress and the UN.

STORIES COVERED

Anthropic releases Claude Opus 5.5 — Anthropic | Claude on X | Ars Technica | Simon Willison | Artificial Analysis

OpenAI cuts API prices in half with GPT-6 Sol and Luna — OpenAI | OpenAI (prompt caching) | Simon Willison

xAI releases Grok 4.7 — xAI

TypeSafe AI's Jev: a model built for decisions, not conversation — awesome-jev (GitHub) | awesome-jev-tools (GitHub) | Simon Willison | arXiv | Latent Space

Grok Bot launches inside Tesla vehicles — Sawyer Merritt on X

Googlebook laptops launch with Gemini in the OS — The Verge

Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 runs a 30B model on-device — The Verge

ChatGPT Voice adds plugins and ChatGPT Work integration — OpenAI on X | TechCrunch

YouTube rolls out AI custom feeds and creator tools — TechCrunch | Ars Technica

Meta's Muse outpaces ChatGPT's early mobile launch — TechCrunch | Platformer |