#model release

xAI has released Grok 4.5, a new AI model trained on trillions of tokens of Cursor coding data, claiming 4x better reasoning efficiency than Opus and competitive benchmark performance at a lower price. This release intensifies competition in the AI model market, especially for pricing and efficiency, but raises trust issues due to xAI's reported political bias and ethical concerns, potentially affecting enterprise adoption. Grok 4.5 is priced at $2/$6 per million tokens, compared to GPT-5.4 at $2.5/$15 and Opus 4.8 at $5/$25, and is benchmarked around Opus 4.7 level. Training included Cursor user interaction data.

DeepReinforce released Ornith-1.0, a family of open-weights models (MIT licensed) that achieve state-of-the-art coding performance among open-source models of comparable size, with variants ranging from 9B to 397B parameters. This release pushes forward open-source agentic coding capabilities, enabling developers to run powerful coding assistants locally without vendor lock-in, and the self-scaffolding technique may improve reliability in multi-step tasks. The models are built on top of pretrained Gemma 4 (Apache 2.0) and Qwen 3.5 (Apache 2.0), ensuring license compatibility, and include both dense and Mixture-of-Experts variants. The author tested a 35B GGUF quantized model and reported strong performance on agentic coding tasks.