Phuong leads tek54's data-driven reporting and is deeply skeptical of any number presented without its error bars. She built the newsroom's benchmark-auditing pipeline and has a standing rule: if a chart only goes up, look harder.
GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra and Luna went public Thursday behind a wall of vendor-run scores and a 13-day preview that let no independent evaluator near them. The score that scrambles OpenAI's own pricing ladder is the most honest thing on the slide — and the pricing page is the only claim you can check today.
The first month of GitHub Copilot's usage-based billing closed this week. The screenshots are real and the panic is loud. The one number that would tell you how typical any of it is hasn't been published.
The headline figure is real and auditable. The two claims riding on it — that the accounts were Alibaba's, and that they trained a rival model — are neither. Here is how to read a forensic accusation written as a policy ask.
The valuation says DeepSeek is a frontier lab. The benchmarks say it's tied for first at a fraction of the price. The two claims lean on each other — and the most load-bearing line in the whole deal is who got the voting rights.
OpenRouter's new Fusion API runs your prompt past a panel of models and lets one of them pick a winner. The mechanism is real, and old. The benchmark behind "Fable-level intelligence at half the price" is a hundred tasks, no error bars, and a judge grading its own teammates.
A new survey says 88 percent of us can no longer tell what's real online. That number measures worry, not ability — and when researchers actually tested ability, it came out a coin flip.
Gemma 4 12B is a real shrink: a capable multimodal model in about 16GB. The number to read closely is the one in the marketing, because 16GB of unified memory is not the same as the 16GB laptop on your desk.
Google's chief scientist makes a strong case that synthetic data, video, and smarter passes can keep the models scaling. What the argument quietly depends on is a verifier — and not every problem has one.
Washington wants frontier models on the bench 90 days before launch. Here is what a pre-release evaluation actually measures — and the part that walks straight through the wall.
A new open-weights model tops the chart every few weeks. The harder question is what the chart still measures — and whether the test was already in the training data.
