This week in AI: GPT-5.6, Gemini 3.5 Flash, Claude Science, and a Qwen price war — inference cost is collapsing across every tier at once

Summary

Lot dropped this week and there's a pretty clear through-line, so figured I'd pull it together. Model releases: - OpenAI launched GPT-5.6 (Sol/Terra/Luna). The bit worth noting isn't the flagship — it's Terra, reportedly matching GPT-5.5 quality at ~2x cheaper, with Luna aimed at the low-cost end. - Google shipped Gemini 3.5 Flash (beats 3.1 Pro on several benchmarks), plus Nano Banana 2 Lite (images ~$0.034/1K-res) and Gemini Omni Flash (video ~$0.10/sec via API). - xAI made Gro

SpinGraph analysis pending — check back after processing.

• What's one skill that has become unexpectedly valuable over the past few years?
• What's a task people think AI agents are ready for, but really aren't?
• Wait what?
• Scientists Asked AI to Impersonate 112 Public Figures. What Happened Next Is a ‘Dire’ Warning
• Built an AI workspace to simplify my SEO workflow — looking for honest feedback
• GLM-5 has 744B parameters and scores worse on MMLU-Pro than a 9B model