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Oct 19, 2026

Gemini 4 Argon's price is set to double Nov 30. Plus an Apache 2.0 coding model

Two big open-weight coding models came out of US labs this week, and only one of them ships under Apache 2.0. To me that matters more than any benchmark chart this week. If you build agent products, the license decides whether you can put the model inside your product without calling a lawyer. The other date to remember is November 30. That's when Gemini 4 Argon's launch price is reported to double. If you plan to test it, do it this month. I haven't run these models on our own work yet, so below is what the labs say, plus my read on it.

MiniMax M3.1 Flash is out at $0.15/$0.60 per million tokens, and it was the anonymous "Space Bunny" model

MiniMax rolled out M3.1 Flash on October 19 with a 1M-token context window, image and video input, and adjustable thinking depth. It says agent tasks cost 70% less than on its previous model.

Inception's Mercury 3 diffusion model claims 1,068 tokens a second, and it's half price at launch

Mercury 3 has a 1M-token context window and costs $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.35 per million output during a 50% launch discount. Inception compares it with GPT-6 Luna and Claude Haiku 5.5.

OpenAI says GPT-6.1 Sol now migrates COBOL programs correctly 86.6% of the time, up from 5.4%

OpenAI published results from two coding evals for languages like COBOL, Fortran, OCaml and Visual Basic, and is releasing one of them, MultiLangBench, on GitHub.

Microsoft open-sources Scope, a self-hosted way to test how coding agents use your SDK or docs

Scope runs the same task through agents like GitHub Copilot and Claude Code, scores each run against criteria you define and keeps the full trace. It's MIT-licensed and you host it yourself.

Mintlify's Autopilot watches your merges and opens docs PRs on its own, at 250 credits per PR

The beta is on Pro and Enterprise plans. It reads code changes, repeated support questions and Slack threads, drafts doc updates and opens a pull request for a person to merge.

Tenstorrent raises $1.5B at a $6.2B valuation to build chips for serving open-weight models

Jim Keller's inference chip company more than doubled its valuation from late 2024, after reportedly drawing acquisition interest from Intel and Qualcomm.