The September 2026 Lineup

The race to develop ever better models is breathtaking. Every weeks a few new good models are released – open, closed, frontier, mid-tier, efficient, expensive, bargain …My approach is to be quite obsessive, inform myself and test most new models, but then curate a small roster of models I use regularly. It’s good to know models well, to have a mental model of how they work and what tasks they are good for – public benchmarks are not enough, there’s no substitute to real experience. And that’s hard to do if you target more than a handful.Great AI models are powerful and deliver a lot of value, making my work and life immeasurably better, so I’m willing to spend. But I also care a lot about cost and always on the lookout for a bargain, so that’s an important factor too.Models(benchmarks and charts from Artifical Analysis)OpenAI GPT-6 AstraEffort: light/low ~ mediumThis is my current “daily driver” in the ChatGPT/Codex app. It’s a terrific model. Raw intelligence isn’t always obviously…