SU-01
SU-01 is a 30B-A3B MoE reasoning model from Shanghai AI Lab that achieves gold-medal performance on IMO 2025, USAMO 2026, and IPhO 2024/2025 using a three-stage training recipe and test-time scaling.
James Kowalski
AI Benchmarks & Tools Analyst
James is a software engineer turned tech writer who spent six years building backend systems at a fintech startup in Chicago before pivoting to full-time analysis of AI tools and infrastructure. His engineering background means he doesn't just read the spec sheet - he runs the benchmarks, profiles the latency, and checks whether the marketing claims hold up under real workloads.
He studied Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he first got hooked on natural language processing during a senior research project on sentiment analysis. He later completed a certificate in data journalism from Northwestern's Medill School.
At Awesome Agents, James owns the leaderboards and tool comparison coverage. He maintains the site's benchmark tracking methodology and is the person who actually runs the numbers before publishing any ranking. He is also an open-source advocate and contributes to several projects in the LLM inference space.
Based in Chicago, IL.
Articles by James Kowalski
HiDream-O1-Image
HiDream-O1-Image is an 8B open-source text-to-image model with a pixel-space diffusion architecture that outperforms 32B FLUX.2 [dev] across five major benchmarks.
SubQ
SubQ is the first LLM built on a fully subquadratic attention architecture, achieving a 12M-token research context and 52x faster inference than FlashAttention at 1M tokens.
Reasoning Model API Pricing Compared - May 2026
Updated May 2026: DeepSeek V4-Flash reasoning now $0.28/MTok output (8x cheaper than R1), o3-pro launched at $20/$80, Grok 4 retires May 15 - verified pricing across 11 models.
ZAYA1-8B
Zyphra's ZAYA1-8B is an 8.4B-parameter MoE reasoning model with only 760M active parameters that matches DeepSeek-R1-0528 on math and coding benchmarks while running at a fraction of the compute cost.
GPT-Realtime-2
OpenAI's second-generation real-time audio model with GPT-5-class reasoning, 128K context, five reasoning levels, and parallel tool calling - now generally available in the Realtime API.
GPT-5.5 Instant
OpenAI's new default ChatGPT model cuts hallucinations by 52.5% and adds Gmail-backed personalization while maintaining the low latency of its predecessor.
Best Coding Models on OpenRouter - Opus 4.7 Rivals
Claude Opus 4.7 scores 87.6% on SWE-bench Verified but costs $5/$25 per million tokens. These four models match or near-match its coding performance at a fraction of the price on OpenRouter.
Best AI Models for Language Translation - May 2026
Gemini 3.1 Pro leads verified 2026 benchmarks at $2 per million tokens while GPT-5.5 and Claude Opus 4.7 postdate available translation evaluations - rankings, scores, and pricing for 10 models.
AI Agent Memory in 2026: 5 Frameworks Ranked
We compared Mem0, Zep, Letta, LangMem, and Cognee on architecture, benchmarks, pricing, and use cases to find the right memory layer for your agent stack.
Fine-Tuning Costs Comparison - Train Your Own AI
May 2026: Together AI adds Llama 4 and DeepSeek fine-tuning, Fireworks raised deployment prices $1/hr, and H100 rentals fell to under $2.40/hr.
GPT-5.5 vs Claude Opus 4.7: Benchmarks and Pricing
GPT-5.5 and Claude Opus 4.7 both launched in April 2026 with 1M context windows and agentic coding focus. One leads on math and long-context retrieval, the other on software engineering and vision.
