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

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

#61

Post by qntmfred » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 5:55 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.

sama literally just said they wish they had bought more. the price drops are almost certainly due to good old fashioned hardware innovation (wafer scale with cerebras) and optimizing hardware development based on model architecture and inference costs. other inference providers will try to do the same if they can.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDB5beon4DY&t=4m20s

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

#62

Post by baq » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 5:56 PM UTC

gentlewater wrote: post #26

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.

This is gonna put Sonnet 5 in a really awkward spot.

I use sonnet as a smart grep and haiku never and that’s only when I have to use Anthropic at all

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

#63

Post by __jl__ » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 5:56 PM UTC

Didn't expect that. Luna pricing is crazy now. I don't think there is anything on the market that competes at this price-performance point.

For our production app, OpenAI clearly is the best provider now. Their API is very reliable and has many nice features. The price-performance of the model lineup is incredible. We used open weights model via Fireworks for a long time (e.g. Kimi K2.5). Fireworks is a great provider but we still ran into issues here and there (Same with Anthropic and Google). OpenAI just works, is fast and in my view has a better price-performance ratio across almost all levels of intelligence.

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

#64

Post by pioneer37 » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 5:56 PM UTC

pavpanchekha wrote: post #4

Making Luna, which was already very cheap and extremely capable, 5x cheaper is crazy. I use Sol at work but Luna at home, and while there's definitely a difference, it doesn't feel like night-and-day. After a year of ever-increasing prices it suddenly feels (between this, Kimi K3, GLM 5.2) that prices are falling again.

Its just a matter of time at this point.These companies are working day and night to capture the market.

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

#65

Post by jnakano89 » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 5:57 PM UTC

Seems like they cut the tiers(GPT-5.6 Luna) where GLM and Kimi compete and still held margin for their frontier models

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

#66

Post by deklesen » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 5:57 PM UTC

jedberg wrote: post #9

pavpanchekha wrote: post #4

Making Luna, which was already very cheap and extremely capable, 5x cheaper is crazy. I use Sol at work but Luna at home, and while there's definitely a difference, it doesn't feel like night-and-day. After a year of ever-increasing prices it suddenly feels (between this, Kimi K3, GLM 5.2) that prices are falling again.

> Sol vs Luna > it doesn't feel like night-and-day. I see what you did there. :)

Good observation! Kudos

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

#67

Post by espadrine » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 5:58 PM UTC

fritzo wrote: post #20

goldsmith112 wrote: post #11

Not sure who would use Terra anymore. Pair Luna High/Xhigh with Sol Medium and that's your power stack

Sounds reasonable. Is there a good benchmark on which make this decision?

I maintain this meta-benchmark leaderboard: https://metabench.organisons.com/

With this new price change, Terra does look pretty Pareto’ed by Luna.

On agentic coding, pairing Sol Medium for architecting with Luna High for coding does kinda make sense. But beware that architecting can be very read-heavy, and Sol is a bit read-pricey compared to Terra.

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

#68

Post by ninjahawk1 » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 5:58 PM UTC

80% less for Luna is absolutely crazy, in my opinion we may reach a point in the next year where powerful models on the API could potentially be cheaper than subscriptions. Compute just keeps decreasing in price.

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

#69

Post by cbg0 » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 5:58 PM UTC

measurablefunc wrote: post #12

bakugo wrote: post #2

> GPT‑5.6 Luna, our fastest and most affordable model, will cost 80% less Looks like the Chinese models are really making a dent. Having 3 different price categories with the "most affordable" one still costing more than GLM 5.2 never made sense.

It all comes back to electricity cost. China has cheaper electricity so as long as China keeps pace there is no way for American companies to undercut them. Each boolean operation in China is cheaper than the one in America. > China: Household rates average around $0.08 / kWh (¥0.53/kWh). vs > US: Household rates average around $0.16 / kWh, though regional variation is massive—ranging from ~$0.10/kWh in low-cost stat…

This doesn't seem correct.

Estimated final electricity price for large industrial customers in energy-intensive industries:

USA 50 USD/MWh

China 68 USD/MWh

https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-2026/prices

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

#70

Post by andai » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 5:59 PM UTC

It says Luna is fastest, but doesn't it take way more steps to get the same job done?

https://deepswe.datacurve.ai/ - (See the Agent Steps view)

Or is the output speed so much higher that it cancels out?

I don't see a lot of benchmarks that record actual time. But on AA, Sol on Low beats Luna on High for Time Per Task.