On October 9, Microsoft released Decision-1, a scoring model for structured decisions. It writes no text — it picks the best option from a given set and returns probability scores. Built on Alibaba's Qwen3.5-9B, input costs $0.042 per million tokens, output is free. The decision-model track that startups heated up last month now has Microsoft, OpenAI, and Cloudflare all in.
Black Forest Labs released the image model FLUX 3 Image on October 1. A single request accepts up to 10 reference images, supports natural-language local editing, with native output up to 4K. API is half-price at launch; the open-weight version is expected within weeks.
Google released its next-gen flagship model Gemini 4 Argon on September 30. The first flagship update in seven months: single outputs up to 1M tokens, launch pricing at $2 input / $10 output per million tokens — but first access goes only to cybersecurity defenders.