LWiAI Podcast #235 - Sonnet 4.6, Deep-thinking tokens, Anthropic vs Pentagon

Moonshot AI has released Kimi K3, a massive new language model with 2.8 trillion parameters, positioned as an open 3T-class model. The article analyzes its reported performance against top models like Claude and GPT-5.x, its new pricing structure, and uses a custom 'pelican benchmark' (generating an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle) to probe its reasoning and cost efficiency. It also discusses what such quirky, targeted benchmarks can reveal about a model's capabilities even as standard benchmarks become less indicative of real-world performance.

Sam Altman announces GPT-5.6 sol, a new OpenAI model that offers significant cost and efficiency improvements over competing models. The model is priced at half the cost and delivers approximately twice the token efficiency compared to 'fable' for accomplishing the same tasks. This represents a major price-performance breakthrough in the AI model market.

Early testing indicates that Sol and Fable models represent significant performance jumps over previous AI models, creating a substantial gap between them and the next-best alternatives. These two models are positioned as the top choices for any work where superior intelligence matters, though users may have individual preferences between them.

Thinking Machines Lab has released Inkling, a new open-weights multimodal foundation model family with a 975B parameter Mixture-of-Experts architecture (41B active), 1M token context, and training on 45 trillion tokens of text, images, audio, and video. The launch includes Inkling-Small (276B total, 12B active) for lower-cost deployment, with weights available on Hugging Face and immediate fine-tuning support on their Tinker platform. The company positions this as a customizable multimodal base model for practical use rather than a benchmark-chasing flagship.

SpaceXAI has launched Grok 4.5, an Opus-class model developed in partnership with Cursor that's positioned as comparable to GPT 5.5/Opus 4.7 but with better speed and cost efficiency. The model represents a new weight class focused specifically on coding and agent applications, marking Cursor's first expansion beyond pure software engineering models. It's immediately available through multiple platforms including Grok API, Cursor, and Hermes Agent.