Technical studies and field notes on machine learning, LLM agents, and the models I take apart in my spare time.
GPT-5.6, Gemini 3.1 Pro, Claude Opus 4.8 & Fable 5, and Grok 4.5 — who actually holds the crown at the closed frontier, and why nobody holds all of it. Adversarially fact-checked: two of five headline claims came back qualified.
Inkling vs GLM 5.2, Kimi K2.7, DeepSeek V4, and Nemotron 3 Ultra — a benchmark-checked field guide to who actually wins what, and how far the open tier has closed the gap to the closed frontier.
A close read of Thinking Machines Lab's 975B open-weights multimodal MoE — what's actually new in the architecture, where it really lands on benchmarks, the real-time system it was built for, and how I'd fine-tune it on Tinker.