alt Hacker Newsluna is the first model that has outdone gpt-5-mini on the pareto frontier for some of my high value, cost sensitive ai product workflows. it's both cheaper (by about 60% in real world use) and higher quality based on my test harnesses. I was really worried that costs would go up since there wasn't a replacement as of a few weeks ago and gpt-5-mini is scheduled to be sunset toward the end of the year. So long as they don't randomly sunset this model anytime soon, that worry has now subsided.
That's interesting, we've had the same results as you at my company. gpt-5-mini was the clear pareto frontier leader for our in-house LLM benchmarks -- benchmarks that we built and tailored to our specific use cases. Then gpt-5.6-luna came along with the price cuts and immediately supplanted gpt-5-mini.
I always thought it was a little odd that gpt-5-mini was the leader for so long when more popular benchmarks placed gpt-5-mini further down the roster, but it seems you had the same result too.