Every day this past week I did something I suspect millions of other people also did: I stared at an LLM model picker and wondered which one I was supposed to want.
OpenAI just released GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna. Sol is the flagship. Terra offers much of its intelligence for less money. Luna is cheaper still. Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 5 at the end of June and Opus 4.8 the month prior, with a little Fable 5 emerging in between. Meanwhile, Google, which seemed to be winning the model wars a few months ago, is now getting shade from Gergely Orosz, who argues that Gemini has slipped outside the top tier for software development and has been out of the major model release game for eons (May 19).
Perhaps Orosz is right. Perhaps he’ll be wrong again in six weeks. Honestly, it’s exhausting.
I use ChatGPT and Claude constantly and still have no principled idea which model to choose most of the time. I tend to click whatever looks like the biggest, most expensive option because I don’t know what I’m giving up by choosing something smaller. “Instant” sounds dangerously unserious. “Thinking” sounds expensive but powerful.
A quick survey of my LinkedIn crowd suggests others also feel my “WHICH MODEL???” pain. More importantly, I suspect most enterprises do, too.
