They're cutting prices because they want to cannabalize the market for people using models like deepseek via API as well as people paying for anthropic subs.
When they cut prices on luna the first time around they took (literally) millions of users from anthropic.
> Cache hits and refreshes on Claude Opus 5.5 are priced at 0.05x the base input price.
If they do the same for Haiku and Sonnet 5.5 then we should also see 5c/mtok and 10c/mtok cache read for those models, respectively. Still too high for Haiku IMO, Luna is 2c/mtok.
All of the chinese labs have been overfitting on benchmark data to game the results for a while now - MiMo and Deepseek are not anywhere near frontier and mostly compete with models like Luna - which they are still worse than.
There isn't much compelling reason to use these unless you are just averse to giving money to openai/altman. A $20 codex sub gives you ~$150 of luna use per weekly limit, while there isn't any good subsidized options for chinese models at all (and the few who were subsidizing, like opencode, rugpulled by reducing monthly limit to $60 to $15 with no notice to users).
I mean, why would you? Chinese models through an API are more expensive than any subsidized subscription and the only one offering a transparent subsidy (opencode) only gives you $15 of credit on any relevant models, and still has a 5 hour limit.
rugpull is a very strong word... I agree that they are not great with their pricing/credit communications, but they do state the multipliers quite clearly in various places. And plenty still have $60 or $30.
Changing pricing buried in docs (which they didn't actually do when they started switching every model to $15 limit 2 months ago BTW, they only did this once people noticed and called it out) without notifying users is the definition of a rugpull.
No chinese lab has caught up yet. They've tried to fake it by distilling and overfitting on benchmarks to make their models look better than they are, the 'best' models available from chinese labs right now (GLM 5.3 and Kimi K3) fall apart completely when you try to do real work with them. K3 is especially embarrassing because it is larger than Mythos yet performs worse than opus 5 and 5.6 sol in benchmarks they haven't been able to fake yet.
> it's also token efficient and cheaper than gpt 5.6.
Deepswe results show that grok 4.6 is more expensive per-task and consistently scores worse than: luna xhigh, glm 5.3, astra low, sol high/xhigh, opus 5 medium.
Grok also used almost 3x as many tokens/turns to complete tasks than all of those models (besides luna), so it takes way more time to complete a task.
There isn't much reason to use Grok at all, it's gotten better but it's still worse than every other player in the field, which shouldn't be a surprise considering until about a year ago they were just buying tokens from other providers and pretending it was their own model.
With gpt-6 luna and sol coming tomorrow it's going to look even worse too, especially if new luna retains the same dirt cheap pricing that 5.6 luna has.
> Why pay $500-700 for Mac Book Neo for the same low processing power experience that you can get on a Googlebook for half the price?
What makes you think a googlebook will be half the price of a macbook neo?
Also, a used M1 macbook air is $300 on swappa/ebay and will be even better than the neo anyway. It's still more performant than every other non-Apple ARM based laptop/chromebook on the market and will have far superior build quality.
Lol. There is zero chance the low end mobile phone SoC shipped in those is remotely as fast as a six year old M1. Even flagship SoCs from qualcomm and samsung still do not exceed it's performance yet.
A plastic macbook lookalike with no ports, a mobile phone OS, a 1366x768 display and probably the cheapest SoC they can scrounge from the parts bin.
This thing, like all other google/android products, will be DOA, and the ones actually duped into buying one will be left with a paperweight in a year or two when the cheap hardware inevitably breaks.
> My mental scenario is one of these guys trying to go into the women's restroom they are now legally obligated to use, and a whole bunch of bystanders bringing violence to the table to prevent it.
That's the desired outcome for them. They want us to either die or comply.
When they cut prices on luna the first time around they took (literally) millions of users from anthropic.
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