5 Frontier Models Compared

I kept picking the wrong model. Not because I didn't know the benchmarks. Because the benchmarks don't tell you what a model actually costs when you're running it daily, or whether it holds up across a 3-hour agent session, or whether it can fit your whole codebase without truncating half of it. Five frontier models shipped in early 2026. All of them are good. None of them is good at everything. DeepSeek V3.2 costs $1 per million input tokens. GPT-5.4 costs $2.50 for the same volume.