Model Economics

On July 23, Black Forest Labs announced FLUX 3. The headline capability is easy to understand: one generation can produce up to 20 seconds of video with native audio. It was quickly described in some corners as an open-source answer to Veo and Sora. I think that claim is premature. At launch, FLUX 3 is still in Early Access. Black Forest Labs has not published API pricing and has not promised when, or whether, FLUX 3 video weights will be released. The company has a real history of open-weight releases, but a company having open-weight products does not make every new model open source. ...

On July 24, Anthropic released Claude Opus 5. The line that jumped out of the announcement was: frontier intelligence of Claude Fable 5 at half the price. A lot of Chinese coverage translated this as “Opus 5 cuts prices in half.” That summary is half right and half wrong. Half right because Anthropic’s own marketing line is exactly that: “frontier intelligence of Claude Fable 5 at half the price.” Half wrong because Anthropic did not cut the token price. Opus 5 still lists at $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens, identical to Opus 4.8. Fast mode is still 2x the base price on the Claude Platform and through usage credits in Claude Code. ...