AI’s Trust Gap: Disputed OpenAI Firings, a Shaky Math Proof and Hidden Model Costs

Pierce and Rich run through the week in AI, seven minutes per topic. Gemini Argon is cheap at $2 / $10 per million tokens until the price doubles after November 30. But on Artificial Analysis it costs $1.99 per task against 72 cents for GPT 6.1 Solmax at about the same score, which is why per-token pricing is starting to mean less than cost per task. Liquid AI’s biggest LFM2.5 model is 24B total with 2B active, combining mixture of experts, short convolutions and grouped query attention to hit 184 tokens per second on an M5 Max. Fish Audio’s Drama 3 takes bracketed stage directions like [exhale] and [emphasis], and gets there with plain GRPO and a pile of human preference data. They also recap the rest of the week: the OpenAI spy caught on camera retrieving his bug, why everyone is copying Tinker’s pay-per-token training API, and OpenAI firing three safety researchers, one of whom was METR’s point of contact. Plus: is the industry getting sloppy as it speeds up? Our first weekly roundup. We set a timer and mostly stuck to it.