Advancing the price-performance frontier with GPT‑5.6 • Hacker News Board

Re: Advancing the price-performance frontier with GPT‑5.6

#31

Post by infecto » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 5:46 PM UTC

buckle8017 wrote: post #21

preommr wrote: post #14

> 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.

They over purchased hardware. This is very likely priced below recovering the cost of the hardware but still above operating expenses.

What evidence is there?

I have no idea either way but one thing that detracts from these threads is folks claiming things as a fact without evidence.

Re: Advancing the price-performance frontier with GPT‑5.6

#32

Post by cute_boi » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 5:46 PM UTC

dominotw wrote: post #16

measurablefunc wrote: post #6

Model segmentation & distillation like this that asks the consumers to pick exactly which version of the algorithm will solve their problem is evidence for lack of intelligence instead of its presence.

it is really hard to know upfront if you have fuzzy task. sometimes i would choose a cheaper model and it will spin and spin with bad outputs ending up costing more had i chosen a more capable model.

there is mixture of experts which is also another routing. So, simple change in prompt can be a big difference.

Re: Advancing the price-performance frontier with GPT‑5.6

#33

Post by paxys » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 5:47 PM UTC

dominotw wrote: post #7

simonw wrote: post #3

> The kernel work helped reduce the end-to-end cost of serving the model by 20%, while its experiments increased token-generation efficiency by more than 15%. If the cost of serving GPT-5.6 just dropped by 20%, does that add up to literally billions of dollars in savings per month? We know Anthropic spend $1.25 billion renting inference capacity from SpaceX (in two Colossus datacenters) from the SpaceX IPO, but we do…

imagine writing that on your resume > reduced inference cost by 20 percent saving company x billion dollars per month

Where are you going to apply to with that resume that’s a step up from your current job though?

Re: Advancing the price-performance frontier with GPT‑5.6

#34

Post by firasd » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 5:47 PM UTC

This is one of the things OpenAI has been focused on for an year or so that led to the doomed autoswitcher in ChatGPT .com (switching models based on estimated task complexity) that was quickly reverted

Whereas Google with Gemini 3.x, Anthropic with Fable etc are happy to just go for 'big model with dense params'

It's hard to guess from the outside of course but just this kind of talking points focus on GPU efficacy is what we see from OpenAI and Chinese open source labs more often than from Anthropic or Google Deepmind and this benchmark chart seems to concur

Re: Advancing the price-performance frontier with GPT‑5.6

#35

Post by bob1029 » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 5:47 PM UTC

This feels like the dialup->broadband transition to me.

I was already a huge proponent of Luna for things like deep research. Being able to run 5x more for the same cost is simply bananas. We are already running 10 parallel agents for hypothesis generation. I cannot imagine 50. The statistics become much more interesting & powerful when you can run so many samples of the exact same prompt+model without breaking the bank.