flâneur

Small Models Have Arrived

calv.info · 667 words · saved by 8 readers

For the past few weeks, I've been playing with gpt-5.6-luna. It is shockingly capable, fast, and smart. I regularly see it do ~100 tps, and rip around my codebase, email, and knowledge base. Of course, the biggest thing with luna is the cost. I've tried running some fairly complicated research threads, and it's pretty tough to run up a large bill. Even having it search across thousands of emails, I end up with an API cost in the tens of cents. With GLM 5.3, we even have a new option at the Pareto frontier. When doing coding work, I almost always reach for the most expensive and capable models (Fable 5, 5.6 Sol). So it's been easy to miss the progress the small fast models have made. One thing a few investors I've talked with have mentioned: "It's weird we're not seeing more consumer AI companies. Why is that?" There's a straightforward answer: token costs. In the times before AI, the playbook for big consumer apps looked like this... This roughly describes most of the big consumer comp

For the past few weeks, I've been playing with gpt-5.6-luna. It is shockingly capable, fast, and smart. I regularly see it do ~100 tps, and rip around my codebase, email, and knowledge base. Of course, the biggest thing with luna is the cost. I've tried running some fairly complicated research threads, and it's pretty tough to run up a large bill. Even having it search across thousands of emails, I end up with an API cost in the tens of cents. With GLM 5.3, we even have a new option at the Pareto frontier. When doing coding work, I almost always reach for the most expensive and capable…

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