The competition’s format was creative: competing models needed to form English words in a letter grid ranging from 10×10 to 30×30 by sliding adjacent tiles. Words under seven letters incurred point penalties, while words of seven letters or more scored based on length. Each pair of models played five rounds with a ten-second time limit per round.

Ten models competed, and the results surprised many observers:

• 1st Place: Kimi K2.6 (Moonshot AI) — 22 points, 7-1-0
• 2nd Place: MiMo V2-Pro (Xiaomi)
• 3rd Place: GPT-5.5
• 5th Place: Claude Opus 4.7

No model from Western frontier labs made the top two.

Kimi K2.6’s strategy was aggressive sliding — it employed a greedy algorithm that at each step sought the move unlocking the most new words. On smaller grids, this approach was less effective, but on the 30×30 large grids, when other models lost competitiveness due to their inability to slide tiles, Kimi K2.6’s continuous output advantage became decisive.

Notably, Kimi K2.6 is an open-weights model — anyone can download and use it. It currently scores 54 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, compared to 60 for GPT-5.5 and 57 for Claude. While not yet at parity, the gap has narrowed considerably — and this comes from a freely available model.

This result marks an important shift in the AI capability landscape: a year ago, the prevailing assumption was that Western frontier labs held an insurmountable lead in model capabilities that open-source models could not close. Today, that gap is rapidly shrinking.

Source: ThinkPol - An open-weights Chinese model just beat Claude, GPT-5.5, and Gemini in a programming challenge

Microsoft-owned code hosting platform GitHub announced through its official blog that GitHub Copilot, its AI-powered programming assistant, will transition to a usage-based billing model starting June 1, 2026, replacing the previous quota-plus-overage system.

How the Billing Changes

Under the current model, Copilot users who exhaust their plan’s usage quota are automatically switched to a “Premium Requests” billing mechanism. The new usage-based approach introduces GitHub AI Credits — each plan tier will include a fixed quota of AI credits that are consumed as users interact with the service.

Notably, code completion and next-edit suggestion features will NOT consume AI credits. This means the core intelligent code autocompletion experience remains unaffected, while more advanced AI interactions — such as conversational coding assistance and complex code generation — will draw from the credit pool.

Pricing Remains Unchanged

GitHub confirmed that base pricing across all tiers will stay the same:

This pricing stability suggests GitHub is using usage-based billing to more equitably distribute computational resources, rather than as a pretext for price increases.

Industry Context

GitHub Copilot is one of the world’s most widely adopted AI programming assistants, with millions of developer users. The billing shift reflects a broader industry trend: as large language model inference costs remain high, AI service providers are transitioning from flat-rate subscriptions to more granular usage-based pricing.

Several AI service providers have already adopted similar credit-based or consumption-based pricing models. Analysts expect this move could trigger a ripple effect, accelerating the evolution of billing models across the AI developer tools industry.

Source: Solidot Report