Muse Spark Undercuts Everyone, Gemini 3.8 Flash Blinks & Claude Learns the Lyrics Rule

Launch season rolled on without a pause. Meta shipped Muse Spark 1.3 with an open-weights promise and a pricing model that is 90% cheaper if you let them train on your traffic, and the model is good enough that Simon Willison's five-level pelican run cost less than eight cents at its most expensive. Google shipped Gemini 3.8 Flash and a trusted-defenders-only Flash Cyber , pulled the blog post within hours, and left a thousand-comment Hacker News thread arguing over whether a Flash model that benchmarks like Opus 5 means Google is back or that Google has given up on frontier models for the public. Simon Willison diffed the Fable 5.1 system pr