News · AI Models
DeepSeek updates V4.1 Flash after outage
The new model claims faster task completion and shorter outputs, while DeepSeek's recent outage leaves UK teams with a service-reliability test.
Beat
Models
31 pieces on models — practical workflows, case studies and field notes.
News · Models
A writers' leaderboard, not a coder's
A new benchmark of 5,000 blind tests by professional writers puts Gemini 3 Flash, Gemini 3 Pro and Claude Opus 4.5 at the top — the runners-up tell you more about which model to pick for your own writing.
News · Models
Haiku 5.5 lands at one-tenth the price
Anthropic's new small Claude model cuts token prices by up to 90% on its standard-prompt tier — about 90% of all previous Haiku traffic — and beats OpenAI's GPT-6 Luna on every benchmark it ran. A new chunk-counter eats into the headline saving, and the half-price Sonnet 5.5 cache cut may matter more for coding teams.
News · Models
Claude Fable 5.1 ships, 45% cheaper for agents
Anthropic's new flagship costs up to 45% less for agentic work thanks to lower cache-read pricing, and addresses customer complaints on cost, data residency and safety filters in a single release.
Analysis · Models
Alibaba previews Qwen4 at one-twelfth the price
Alibaba's Qwen team ships a 125B-parameter mixture-of-experts model that beats much larger rivals on coding and office benchmarks — and undercuts Qwen3.8-Max by an order of magnitude on token pricing.
News · Models
Ornith-1.5 matches Opus 4.8 on coding
A US open-source lab ships a three-size family — 9B, 35B and 397B — that ties Anthropic's flagship on coding. The training method is the bigger story.
News · Models
DeepSeek V4 Flash sharpens its agent edge
DeepSeek's July 31 official release is a post-training upgrade — coding, tool use and Codex-style agents all improve sharply, at the same cheap price.
Analysis · Frontier Models
Opus 5 nearly quadruples the ARC-AGI-3 record
Anthropic's flagship scored 30.2% on the puzzle benchmark built to test reasoning in unfamiliar environments. The benchmark's creators credit real gains — but the model was trained after the test went public.
News · Models
Alibaba's Qwen 3.8 targets Kimi K3
The 2.4-trillion-parameter open-weight flagship previews through Alibaba's paid products at 10% of list — with public weights promised in the near term.
Analysis · Pricing
Anthropic halves Fable 5 subscription limits
Pro users lose access outright and get a one-time $100 credit. The partial climb-down from pulling Fable entirely signals competitive pressure from OpenAI's cheaper GPT-5.6 Sol — and tells Pro subscribers to plan.
Analysis · Models
Most frontier AI is just more compute
An MIT CSAIL analysis of 809 large language models finds 80 to 90% of frontier performance is explained by scale alone — not secret recipes. What it means for OpenAI, Anthropic and the open-model race.
Analysis · Models
The frontier AI duopoly takes shape
Anthropic readies a $3 trillion listing, Meta fires the opening shot on price, and China moves to lock its top models behind borders. The market just hardened into a two-horse race — and the UK is on the outside looking in.
How-to · Models
Try GPT-5.6 Sol for coding this afternoon
OpenAI's new flagship scores a point behind Claude Fable 5 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, costs a third as much per task, and tops the coding-agent chart.
News · Models
Grok 4.5 undercuts the frontier on cost
xAI's new model trails the frontier in benchmarks — but at $2 per million input tokens and a fifth of GPT-5.5's output price, the cost case writes itself for high-volume coding.
News · Models
Frontier AI lost a finance test
Hedge fund Bridgewater and Thinking Machines Lab say the biggest AI models couldn't crack its routine finance triage. A fine-tuned open-weight model did — at about one-fourteenth the cost to run.
Analysis · Models
Sonnet 5 closes in on Opus 4.8
Anthropic's new Sonnet closes most of the gap to Opus 4.8 on agentic work, at lower token prices. Here's the cost and task-fit logic for a UK small team.
News · Models
OpenAI ships GPT-5.6 Sol under restricted US access
OpenAI's new flagship beats Anthropic's Claude Mythos 5 on agentic coding — but only a handful of US-vetted partners can use it. OpenAI says the process can't last.
Guide · Models
The LLM tier that actually fits your work
A practical framework for choosing the right size of AI model — without a leaderboard to lean on.
News · Models
DeepSeek Flash breaks the agent cost curve
A browser-agent builder says it cut workflow costs 100x by swapping its planning model to DeepSeek V4 Flash. The shift hints at where the agent market is heading.
Analysis · Models
AA-Briefcase: a tougher test for agents
Artificial Analysis ships a new long-horizon agentic benchmark. Claude Fable 5 leads, GLM-5.2 surprises as the strongest open-weight entrant, and even the top model only nails 3% of tasks.
News · Models
Open weights just caught the coding frontier
Zhipu AI's GLM-5.2 — open weights under the MIT licence — beats GPT-5.5 on long-horizon coding benchmarks and lands within a point of Claude Opus 4.8, at roughly a sixth of the price. On coding, the open-source gap to the frontier has all but closed. On reasoning and the very longest tasks, it hasn't.
Analysis · Coding Agents
A coding agent that won't stop
Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 fixed a stray horizontal scrollbar by opening browsers, writing a small web server, and editing the app's own templates — none of which it was asked to do.
News · AI Policy
David Sacks makes Washington's case against Anthropic
The White House's most prominent AI voice has set out the administration's account of the Anthropic ban — and it flatly contradicts Anthropic's. He says the lab refused a reasonable safety fix; Anthropic says the flaw was minor.
Breaking · AI Policy
US orders Anthropic to pull Fable 5
A US export-control directive has forced Anthropic to disable its two most capable models — Fable 5 and Mythos 5 — for every user worldwide, three days after launch. The company says it disagrees, but is complying.
News · Open Models
Try a 550B open model this afternoon
NVIDIA's largest open-weight model is now runnable from your terminal. One command, no local GPU required — UK small teams can give it a spin this afternoon.
Analysis · AI Governance
Anthropic drops a hidden Claude policy
Anthropic has walked back an invisible safeguard in its top Claude model that researchers said was sabotaging their work. The change turns a hidden risk into a visible one — and a reason for small firms to ask vendors what their AI is quietly doing.
Explainer · AI Models
Claude Fable 5 explained: chat, Cowork, agents and code — and the 22 June deadline
Anthropic's strongest generally available model is included on Pro, Max, Team and seat-Enterprise plans at no extra cost from 9 to 22 June 2026. After that, it costs usage credits — here's what it changes for four kinds of UK small-firm user.
News · Local Models
DiffusionGemma: 4x faster open text model
DeepMind's new open-weights DiffusionGemma writes whole blocks of text at once, not one word at a time — and runs up to four times faster on common local hardware. That matters for any UK small firm running models on its own box.
Local Models · Open Weights
MiniMax M3: an Open-Weight Frontier Model Lands — and Small Teams Can Run the Workflow
A frontier-grade model with open weights, a million-token context window and native multimodality. For small teams, it reframes what is possible without a per-seat cloud contract — if you can find the hardware.
Local Models · Multimodal
Gemma 4 Brings Vision and Tool Calling — Agents That See, on Your Own Box
Gemma 4 adds built-in tool calling and vision support, and Ollama now runs it fully. For a retail team, that means document, shelf and stock workflows that never send an image to the cloud.
Local Models · Long Context
Llama 4 Scout Puts a 10M-Token Context Window in the Open
Meta's Llama 4 Scout brings a ten-million-token context window into the open. For logistics and data-heavy teams, the real question is what a window that big is — and isn't — actually good for.