Section

Models

Frontier and open-weight model releases, benchmarks, pricing and what each one changes for the people who build on them.

An editorial mix across topics. Dates show when each story was published or updated.

14 stories

  1. Claude Fable 5.2 for builders: when to route past Opus 5.5, and what it costs

    Fable 5.2 costs $8/$40 per million tokens, twice Opus 5.5. What Anthropic's data says it buys, plus fast mode, advisor rules and the preserved-thinking break.

    29 min read

  2. Gemini 4 Carbon goes public, and its introductory price ends 30 November

    Google's strongest model costs $2/$10 per million tokens until 30 November, then $4/$20. How to budget the switch, what /swarm does, and the #1 claim today.

    25 min read

  3. Explainer

    Mistral Large 4 open weights: free to run in-house, licensed to resell

    The licence turns on whether third parties control the model, not company size. vLLM validates 610 GB of NVFP4 weights on four GB300s, or FP8 on two H200 nodes.

    26 min read

  4. Muse Ember wants the subagent slot. Its list price matches Haiku and Luna

    Meta's smallest Muse model lists at $0.10 in and $0.50 out, like its rivals. Cache rates, context tiers and a max-effort default decide what an executor costs.

    24 min read

  5. Analysis

    Apertus 1.5 opens the recipe, including the parts that did not work

    The multimodal release makes its tokenizer, training stages and limitations inspectable. Its most useful contribution is the ability to trace behaviour back to decisions.

    16 min read

  6. Analysis

    Genie 4 turns generated scenes into interactive worlds

    DeepMind's research preview combines real-time steering with generated sound. The useful distinction is between a persuasive scene and a dependable environment.

    16 min read

  7. Analysis

    Muse Spark Open: what changes when the weights are available

    The release opens several deployment paths, but active parameters, checkpoint size, runtime support and licence terms answer different practical questions.

    16 min read

  8. Explainer

    Claude Sonnet 5.5: a practical guide to price, effort, benchmarks and migration

    Anthropic's mid-tier model costs $2 in and $10 out per million tokens with a 1M context. What changed from Sonnet 5, when to pick it over Opus 5.5 or Haiku 5.5, and how to migrate.

    24 min read

  9. Comparison

    Best LLM for coding in October 2026: ten models ranked on the evidence

    Opus 5.5, GPT-6.1 Sol, Gemini 4 Argon and seven more ranked on Terminal-Bench 4.0, DeepSWE and cost per task, with each score's harness and source.

    23 min read

  10. Explainer

    Self-hosted LLM guide for 2026: VRAM maths, Ollama vs vLLM and the break-even

    When a self-hosted LLM pays off, how to size GPU memory for weights and KV cache, which inference server fits which job, and what the hardware really costs.

    25 min read

  11. Comparison

    Top 10 open-weight models in October 2026, ranked for teams that self-host

    MiMo-V2.6-Pro, GLM-5.3, DeepSeek V4.1 and seven more, ranked on independent evals, licence terms, active parameters, hardware and serving support, each read from its own model card.

    22 min read

  12. Explainer

    How to read a model card without being fooled: the 2026 field guide

    System cards now run past 200 pages. We take five current cards apart section by section, show how one benchmark is reported five different ways, and set out a ten-step reading protocol.

    30 min read