Grok 4.5 Rivals Opus at a Fraction of the Cost, ChatGPT’s Voice Gets GPT-Live, Seedream 5.0
Today we’re covering the biggest AI stories of July 9th, 2026. SpaceX AI and Cursor released Grok 4.5, the first model built jointly since Cursor’s $60 billion acquisition, delivering benchmarks near Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT 5.5, running at 80 tokens per second, and pricing at $2/$6 per million tokens compared to $5/$25 for Opus, instantly putting Grok back into serious contention after months of lagging behind. OpenAI rolled out GPT-Live, a full duplex voice model that listens, reasons, and speaks simultaneously instead of stringing together separate systems, removing the awkward pauses that…
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