Technology

Frontier model releases and developer tooling, read for what changes in practice rather than what the launch post claims.

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The largest category on the site, and the fastest-moving. New frontier models ship every few weeks, each with a launch post making its case, and the useful question is almost never the one the launch post answers. What we try to establish instead: what this release actually changes for someone with work to do, whether the price and context window make it a sensible default for a given job, and how it compares to the model you are already using rather than to the previous generation.

That means a lot of comparisons, a lot of pricing arithmetic, and a certain amount of deflation. Some releases are genuinely a step change and we say so; more are incremental, repositioned, or a price cut wearing a new name, and we say that too. Model behaviour also drifts after launch, so where a model has visibly changed since release we cover that as its own story.

Local and open-weight models, inference hardware, image and audio generation, and the agentic coding tools sit here as well — the common thread is that these are articles about the technology itself. For applying it to a process, start with AI automation or workflow optimization.

Questions this category answers

  • What a new model release changes in practice, beyond the benchmark chart
  • Which model is the sensible default for a given job at current prices
  • How two frontier models actually differ on the work you are doing
  • When a local or open-weight model is enough, and when it is not

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