Which AI tool actually wins — for coding, writing, images, voice and real work. Practitioner-tested breakdowns, updated for 2026.
GLM-5.3 scores 88.2 on Terminal-Bench v2.1 to Beam's 80.1. Reflection's efficiency claim is against GLM-5.2, not 5.3, and uses a formula excluding prefill and serving overhead. High-volume agent loops change the answer; low volume does not.
DeepSeek V4.1 Flash scores 90.6 on Terminal-Bench v2.1 against Beam's 80.1. Beam claims three to four times less inference compute. If you run a few hard tasks a day, take the score; if you run agent loops at volume, the token count is your bill.
Claude Opus 4.8, Opus 5 and GPT-5.6 Terra leave GitHub Copilot on 16 November. Opus 5.5 is the Opus replacement, GPT-6.1 Sol or GPT-6 Luna for Terra. Pick by what broke on your own codebase, not by benchmark — and check every pinned model name first.
Meta opened an 816B mixture-of-experts model tuned for Mac Studios under its own licence; Nvidia opened a 120B multimodal agent model under OpenMDW. The licence difference decides more commercial cases than the benchmark difference does.
Meta Muse Wonder costs $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output. GPT-6.1 Sol costs $2 and $10, with cached input at $0.10. Meta says Wonder is competitive with the best models in the world but has published no numeric benchmark scores, no parameter count and no context window. This compares what can actually be compared.
Mistral Large 4 and Reflection AI's Beam both promise open weights before the end of October 2026. Mistral is in public API preview at $0.68 per million input tokens; Beam is waitlist-only with no published price. Their headline benchmark numbers look wildly different because they were measured on different versions of the same test.
OpenAI $0.10, Jev and Microsoft Decision-1 both $0.042. All three charge nothing for output. Only OpenAI takes images.
Both cost $0.10 in and $0.50 out. Haiku's cheap band ends at 100K tokens, Luna's at 272K — and Haiku wins every published benchmark.
Haiku 5.5 is $0.10/$0.50 under 100K tokens against Flash-Lite's flat $0.30/$2.50. Above 100K the order reverses. Max output differs 2x.