Models & Frontiers
What the new models can actually do, how they were trained, and whether the benchmarks mean anything. Open source vs closed, and where the research is heading.
Key Guides
From the team behind Swarm Signal
Track Your Finances While You Build AI
BoredTools makes the boring stuff easy — budget dashboards, freelance trackers, and business planners. Download free or grab the full collection.
How to Build an MCP Server: A Practitioner's Development Guide
title: "How to Build an MCP Server: A Practitioner's Development Guide"
Inference Optimization: From 10x Cost to 10x Speed
In late 2022, running a query against GPT-3-class performance cost roughly $20 per million tokens. By March 2026, multiple models exceed that same...
Model Selection Guide: How to Pick the Right AI Model for Your Use Case
A March 2026 survey of the [Artificial Analysis leaderboard](https://artificialanalysis.ai/) counts 429 tracked models, over 200 of them open-weight....
From Answer to Insight: Why Reasoning Tokens Are a Quiet Revolution in AI
In September 2024, OpenAI's o1 model [achieved an 89th percentile ranking](https://openai.com/index/learning-to-reason-with-llms/) among competitive...
Scaling Laws Explained for Practitioners: What Actually Matters in 2026
Scaling laws promised a simple deal: spend more compute, get better models. For three years, that deal held. Kaplan et al. drew the first power-law curves...
The Training Data Problem: Why What Models Learn From Matters More Than How Much
GPT-4 and Llama 3 differ less in architecture than most people assume. Both are dense transformer models. Both use variants of attention mechanisms...
The Benchmark Trap: When High Scores Hide Low Readiness
GPT-5 solves 65% of single-issue bug fixes on SWE-Bench Verified. The same model achieves just 21% on [SWE-EVO](https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18470), where...
When Models See and Speak: The Multimodal Agent Arrives
The best vision-language models can match human performance on many tasks. But ask them to fact-check a claim using visual evidence and they collapse:...
Best Open-Weight Models for Production AI Agents 2026
Your agent framework doesn't matter if the model underneath it can't call tools reliably. We tested and ranked eight open-weight models specifically for agent use cases: tool calling accuracy, multi-step reasoning, context retention, hosting economics, and licensing terms.
MoE vs Dense Models: A Practitioner's Decision Guide for 2026
Mixture of Experts models are cheaper per token. That's the headline every vendor leads with. But 'cheaper per token' and 'better for your workload' aren't the same thing.