# benchmark

Adam Hunt flipped from bull to bear: recent model generations seem to be growing only one spike — coding and math — while language and reasoning stagnate or regress. He gives himself 40% conviction and hopes the next year or two proves him wrong.

Kun Chen cycled through every model-size × reasoning-intensity combo for two weeks and landed on a clean split: model size gives "wisdom," reasoning intensity gives "diligence." The two aren't interchangeable — and benchmarks flattening them into one score is why people confuse them.

Sakana ships Fugu: a multi-agent orchestration system behind one API, sold as "AI sovereignty." But a researcher who read the tech report tears it down — a closed orchestrator on closed models means you control less, not more, and it wins benchmarks while never reporting cost.

OpenRouter shipped Fusion: run several models in parallel, then have one model read every answer and rewrite a final response. On DRACO, three cheap models beat solo GPT-5.5 and Opus 4.8 and nearly match Fable 5 at half the cost.

SemiAnalysis benchmarked ~1,000 GPUs across NVIDIA and AMD lineups. GB300 NVL72 hits 100x over H100 — Jensen's 30x was an underestimate. AMD FP8 competes, but FP4+disagg+wideEP combo falls apart in software.

Artificial Analysis launches AA-AgentPerf, a hardware benchmark that uses real coding agent trajectories instead of synthetic queries. It allows production optimizations, measures per-accelerator/per-kW/per-dollar efficiency, and scales from single cards to full racks.

ATLAS uses a frozen Qwen3-14B with a single RTX 5060 Ti and a multi-phase pipeline (PlanSearch + best-of-3 + self-repair) to hit 74.6% on LiveCodeBench — passing Sonnet 4.5's 71.4%. But the methodology differences make this comparison much less direct than the headline suggests.

Dan McAteer shares his long-context observations: Opus 4.6 performs best at 1 million tokens with 78% accuracy, Sonnet 4.6 is the closest competitor, and GPT-5.4 actually regressed compared to GPT-5.2 at long context.

xAI released Grok 4.20 Beta with API access. Artificial Analysis found the best hallucination rate it has tested, while intelligence still trails the frontier. The sharper question: what if being honest matters more than being smart?

Epoch AI's SWE-bench Verified v2.x aligns model scores with developer reports. Key lesson: benchmark outcomes are heavily influenced by scaffold/tooling quality, environment reliability, and evaluation settings, not just base model capability.

Google announced Gemini 3.1 Pro preview with stronger core reasoning and a verified 77.1% on ARC-AGI-2. The real engineering question is whether the model can handle complex multi-step production workflows, not just win benchmarks.

Liquid AI's LFM2.5-1.2B-Thinking (1.17B param, 32K context) runs on-device (<1GB mem). Claims to match/beat Qwen3-1.7B on reasoning, with faster decoding & fewer tokens. Strong for tool-calling/data extraction, but weaker on knowledge-heavy tasks.

SWE-bench: Claude Opus 4.5 (76.8%) unexpectedly beat 4.6 (75.6%) for #1. MiniMax M2.5 tied for #2 at 1/20th Opus's price, with 4 Chinese models in top 10. GPT-5.3-Codex missed due to no API. Bonus: Claude for Chrome to add chart labels.

SemiAnalysis: Kimi K2.5's agent swarm uses an RL-trained 'orchestrator' (not prompt magic). Claude Agent Teams were slower, pricier, & scored lower. Multi-agent is shifting from 'prompt engineering' to 'distributed scheduling.'