AI Week in Review 26.10.10 - by Patrick McGuinness

OpenAI has halved the price of its top-tier inference and made automated code review free, which is the pricing strategy of a man in a nightclub handing out the first round and quietly itemising your receipts. The new 'Ultrafast' tier for GPT-6.1 Sol delivers an 8 to 14 times throughput boost across the API, Codex and ChatGPT Work, and is 'engineered for latency-critical agent workflows' — because nothing says careful deliberation like a system built to think as little as possible about waiting. It runs at 'near-Astra frontier reasoning capabilities,' where 'near' is the syllable that pays the mortgage. Nearly there, nearly aligned, nearly an audit trail.

The free automated code review is my favourite line item. Codex will now inspect your code for nothing, which is generous until you notice it is also the thing that wrote the code, reviewed the review, and filed the ticket under 'resolved.' Patrick McGuinness's weekly review frames all this as a week in AI, and fair play — a Substack newsletter is now where frontier capability announcements land, somewhere between a sponsored post and a conference booking link. Half-price inference and free code review are not generosity; they are customer acquisition, and the customer is whoever can now afford to point an agent at a codebase and walk away.

Still, cheer up: this is the cheap part. Inference at half price and code review at zero is a distribution play, and the distribution is agentic workflows that act on your behalf at fourteen times the rate. When something goes wrong it will go wrong fourteen times faster, which will presumably be addressed in a future weekly review with the same tone of mild surprise. The labs have worked out that the way to win the safety argument is to make the capability too cheap to argue about. Eight to fourteen times the throughput, half the price, and the whole thing arrives via Substack — genuinely, what could possibly go wrong, and at what discount?