Question 1

Which AI model is the best right now?

Accepted Answer

In 2026 the three highest-scoring models on our intelligence index are GPT-5.5 (82), Claude 4 Opus (81) and Gemini 2.5 Pro (78). The “best” depends on the task — GPT-5.5 leads on reasoning and tool use, Claude 4 Opus on long-context code, and Gemini 2.5 Pro on multimodal work with its 2M-token window.

Question 2

Which AI model is best for coding?

Accepted Answer

Claude 4 Opus is the current leader on HumanEval and on real-world code-editing benchmarks like SWE-bench, with GPT-5.5 a close second when paired with tool use. For cheaper everyday coding, Claude 4 Sonnet and GPT-5.5 mini both punch above their weight, and OpenAI o1 / DeepSeek R1 are the strongest picks for hard algorithmic problems.

Question 3

Which AI model is best for writing?

Accepted Answer

Claude 4 Sonnet and Claude 4 Opus are widely preferred for long-form writing — they produce more coherent, less repetitive prose than GPT models at the same quality tier. GPT-5.5 tends to be stronger when the writing task involves structured reasoning, research or following a complex brief.

Question 4

What is the best open-source AI model?

Accepted Answer

DeepSeek V3 and DeepSeek R1 are the strongest open-weights models in 2026, beating most proprietary mid-tier models on reasoning and code. Llama 3.3 70B and Qwen 2.5 72B are the most popular general-purpose open-source alternatives — both are easy to self-host and free of API fees.

Question 5

Which is the cheapest AI model with strong quality?

Accepted Answer

Llama 3.1 8B is the cheapest model on our list at around $0.06 per 1M blended tokens, but quality is limited. For a much better quality-per-dollar ratio, Gemini 2.0 Flash, GPT-4o mini and Llama 3.3 70B all sit under $0.30 per 1M tokens and still hit production-grade intelligence scores.

Question 6

Is GPT-5.5 better than Claude 4 Opus?

Accepted Answer

It depends on the task. GPT-5.5 has a slight edge on the overall intelligence index (82 vs 81), on reasoning, and on tool use, while Claude 4 Opus leads on long-context code and document understanding thanks to its 500k context window. See our GPT-5.5 vs Claude 4 Opus side-by-side comparison for a full breakdown.

Question 7

What is a reasoning model?

Accepted Answer

A reasoning model is a large language model trained to produce a long chain-of-thought (often hidden from the user) before answering. Reasoning models take longer and cost more per query than standard chat models, but they score dramatically higher on hard math, coding and planning tasks. OpenAI o1, OpenAI o3-mini and DeepSeek R1 are the best-known examples.

Question 8

What is a context window in AI?

Accepted Answer

The context window is the maximum amount of text — measured in tokens, where one token is roughly ¾ of an English word — that a model can read and reason over in a single request. Larger windows let you fit more documents, longer chat histories or bigger codebases. In 2026 common sizes range from 128k tokens (GPT-4o, DeepSeek V3) to 2M tokens (Gemini 2.5 Pro).

Question 9

How much does it cost to use an AI model API?

Accepted Answer

Most language models charge per million tokens of input and output text. Frontier models like GPT-5.5 run about $5 / $15 per 1M (input / output), while budget models like Gemini 2.0 Flash or Llama 3.1 8B are under $0.30 per 1M. Image, video and audio models price per generated image, per second of video or per minute of audio instead.

Question 10

What is the “intelligence index”?

Accepted Answer

A 0–100 composite of public benchmarks (MMLU, MMLU Pro, GPQA, MATH, HumanEval). Higher is better. It’s a useful rough ordering, but always check the underlying scores — a model can be strong on code but weak on world knowledge and end up with a middling index.

Question 11

How is speed measured?

Accepted Answer

Median output tokens per second across the major API providers for each model, measured during steady-state generation (not the very first token). Reasoning models that pause to “think” will look slower on this metric — that’s expected.

Question 12

What is the “blended” price?

Accepted Answer

A single number that mixes input and output token prices at a 3:1 ratio (the average ratio for real production workloads). It lets you compare models that have very different input vs output pricing on a single axis.

Question 13

How often is the data refreshed?

Accepted Answer

Monthly. Every entry has a lastUpdated stamp; we re-pull prices and benchmark scores on the first week of each month. Open an issue if you spot something stale.


GPT-5.5	OpenAI	82	95 tok/s	0.42s	400k	$5.00	$15.00	$7.50
Claude 4 Opus	Anthropic	81	50 tok/s	1.4s	500k	$8.00	$40.00	$16.00
Gemini 2.5 Pro	Google	78	110 tok/s	0.7s	2M	$1.25	$5.00	$2.19
OpenAI o1	OpenAI	76	32 tok/s	12s	200k	$15.00	$60.00	$26.25
Claude 4 Sonnet	Anthropic	75	95 tok/s	0.85s	500k	$3.00	$15.00	$6.00
Grok 3	xAI	74	75 tok/s	0.6s	1M	$3.00	$15.00	$6.00
DeepSeek R1	DeepSeek	73	60 tok/s	1.5s	128k	$0.55	$2.19	$0.96
GPT-4o	OpenAI	72	110 tok/s	0.4s	128k	$2.50	$10.00	$4.38
Claude 3.5 Sonnet	Anthropic	71	85 tok/s	0.9s	200k	$3.00	$15.00	$6.00
OpenAI o3-mini	OpenAI	70	60 tok/s	6.5s	200k	$1.10	$4.40	$1.93
GPT-5.5 mini	OpenAI	68	180 tok/s	0.28s	400k	$0.25	$1.00	$0.44
DeepSeek V3	DeepSeek	67	90 tok/s	0.45s	64k	$0.27	$1.10	$0.48
Gemini 1.5 Pro	Google	67	60 tok/s	0.9s	2M	$1.25	$5.00	$2.19
Llama 3.3 70B*	Meta	66	200 tok/s	0.4s	128k	$0.23	$0.40	$0.27
Gemini 2.0 Flash	Google	64	220 tok/s	0.3s	1M	$0.10	$0.40	$0.18
Llama 3.1 405B*	Meta	64	32 tok/s	0.7s	128k	$2.70	$2.70	$2.70
Qwen 2.5 72B*	Alibaba	62	55 tok/s	0.5s	128k	$0.40	$0.40	$0.40
Mistral Large 2	Mistral	60	70 tok/s	0.6s	128k	$2.00	$6.00	$3.00
Claude 3.5 Haiku	Anthropic	58	130 tok/s	0.5s	200k	$0.80	$4.00	$1.60
GPT-4o mini	OpenAI	56	145 tok/s	0.32s	128k	$0.15	$0.60	$0.26
Mistral Small 3	Mistral	52	150 tok/s	0.3s	32k	$0.20	$0.60	$0.30
Llama 3.1 8B*	Meta	44	750 tok/s	0.2s	128k	$0.06	$0.06	$0.06

AI Models Compared

Top picks across each axis

All Large Language Models

Browse AI Models by category

By License

Open Source

Proprietary

By Purpose

Frontier

Reasoning

Fast & Cheap

Code

Multimodal

By Modality

Text-to-Image

Text-to-Video

Text-to-Speech

By Provider

OpenAI

Anthropic

Google

Meta

Mistral

DeepSeek

xAI

Alibaba

Midjourney

Black Forest Labs

Stability AI

Runway

Kuaishou

ElevenLabs

Cartesia

Popular AI model comparisons

Frequently asked questions