Every new AI model, read for founders

Latest edition

System Card, November 2026

Published November 1, 2026·Covers September 30, 2026 to November 1, 2026·Prices checked November 1, 2026

• OpenAI / Test this first if you run a mid model

  GPT-6.1 Terra arrived at $1 in, $5 out

  OpenAI's new mid tier (system card, Oct 26) accepts reasoning effort "none", writes well and reads screens and documents. On the Artificial Analysis index it scores 42 at high effort for 26 cents a task: 97 percent cheaper per task than Claude Sonnet 5.5 at its best setting ($10.02), the mid model most founders reach for, for a score 22 percent lower (42 vs 54). With reasoning off it starts answering in under a second, and Artificial Analysis measures about 1.5 times Sol's output speed (OpenAI claims 3x). If your product runs on last generation's mid model, this is the one to test first.

• Google / Finish any Argon trial before Dec 1

  Gemini 4 Argon went GA, then Carbon took first place

  Argon (model card) went GA Oct 13 at $2 / $10, Sonnet 5.5's list price, and costs 23 percent less per task than Sonnet at its best setting ($7.68 vs $10.02) for a score 7 percent lower (50 vs 54); the price doubles Dec 1. Carbon (Oct 28, no card yet) scores 2 percent above Opus 5.5 (59 vs 58) at 23 percent less per task ($7.76 vs $10.04) and tops LMArena Text, but is gated to cyber defenders for now.

• Artificial Analysis / Never compare old and new scores

  Artificial Analysis reset its index to v5

  On Oct 27 the index swapped in private test sets. Haiku 5.5 fell from 43 to 36 (16 percent) with no model change; Kimi K3.1 Pro from 55 to 46. The gap from the best closed model to the best downloadable open model is now 27 points (59 vs 32), 46 percent of the leader's score, against 12 points on the old scale. Never compare a September score with a November one.

• Mistral · Reflection AI · Meta · DeepSeek / Cheaper open models worth a trial

  Mistral, Reflection and Meta shipped what they said

  Mistral Large 4 (model card) landed Oct 29 at 63 percent lower cost per task than its own October preview ($2.06 vs $5.54), the top open model outside China. Reflection Beam (model card) shipped Apache 2.0 weights Oct 16 using half the output tokens of K2 Horizon for one point less. Muse Spark Open (model card), 816B parameters, is the top US open model at 25, 58 percent below the index leader. DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 (model card) scores 32 at $0.60 a task, 94 percent cheaper than Opus 5.5 for 55 percent of its score, and runs 48 trillion tokens a week on OpenRouter.

• xAI · Mistral · OpenAI / Move off OpenAI TTS by Jan 6, 2027

  Grok Voice 3.0 leads speech to speech; OpenAI retires its TTS line

  Grok Voice 3.0 (release post, no card) tops the Artificial Analysis speech-to-speech index at 86.9, up 7 percent on Voice 2.0, with support-call accuracy up 27 percent (71.6 vs 56.5 on tau-Voice) at the same $0.08 a minute, though it answers slightly slower (0.81 s to first audio vs 0.70 s). Voxtral 3 (release post, no card) prices transcription at $0.0035 a minute, 22 percent below OpenAI's GPT Transcribe. OpenAI retires tts-1 and tts-1-hd on Jan 6, 2027 with a realtime-only replacement, so anything built on them needs a new home.

• Anthropic / Try Sonnet before Opus for documents

  Claude shipped no model and held the work boards anyway

  Opus 5.5 (system card) leads GDPval-AA (documents, slides, spreadsheets) by 28 Elo over Sonnet 5.5 at twice the list price, and Sonnet 5.5 lands within 2 percent of it on the Vals Terminal-Bench run (64.1 vs 65.2 percent). The newest entry on Anthropic's system card index is still Haiku 5.5 (Oct 7). API version 2026-10-21 removes temperature; Opus 5.5 fast mode is GA at 2x price ($8 / $40) for up to 2.5x output speed (Anthropic's claim, not yet measured independently).