[AINews] GPT 5.6 price cut by 20%-80%: Cost of GPT 5.4 Intelligence dropped 13x in 4 months due to GPT 5.6 recursive self-optimization

OpenAI has cut the price of its GPT-5.6 models by 20% to 80%, with the drop driven largely by internal recursive self-optimization that reduced serving costs. The smaller GPT-5.6 Luna now provides intelligence equivalent to March’s flagship GPT-5.4 at roughly one-thirteenth the token price—$0.20 per million input tokens and $1.20 per million output tokens—four months after that flagship’s release. The company credits systems-level improvements including autonomous kernel rewriting that cut end-to-end serving costs by 20%, improved speculative decoding that raised token-generation efficiency by over 15%, and optimized KV caching for specific workloads. A new 2.5× faster Sol tier was also introduced at twice the standard price. These moves extend a multi-year trend of steeply declining costs for a fixed level of model capability, suggesting that the cost of intelligence is continuing to fall rapidly even as models advance. Observers note this shifts the price-performance frontier in favor of hosted frontier models, particularly for cost-sensitive tasks like agent workflows, where OpenAI expects roughly 10× lower cost by migrating from GPT-5.4 to Luna. The development matters because,

Follow Latent Space to make it a durable For You signal.