Grok 4.5
Grok 4.5 is xAI's 1.5-trillion-parameter V9 model in private beta at SpaceX and Tesla, with supplemental training on Cursor coding data and early evals claiming performance near Claude Opus 4.8.
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
Gemini 3.5 Pro
Google DeepMind's upcoming flagship model with a 2M-token context window and Deep Think reasoning, announced at Google I/O 2026 and expected in July.
Claude Mythos 5
Claude Mythos 5 is the full release of Anthropic's restricted Mythos family - same weights as Fable 5 but without safety classifiers for cybersecurity and biology, at $10/M input and $50/M output tokens.
North Mini Code
Cohere's first developer-focused model - 30B sparse MoE with 3B active parameters, free Apache 2.0 license, 256K context window, and 33.4 on the AA Coding Index.
Kling 3.0
Kuaishou's Kling 3.0 is the first commercially available AI video model to ship native 4K at 60fps, with multilingual audio, multi-shot storyboarding, and a $0.075/s API.
Grok Imagine Video 1.5
xAI's Grok Imagine Video 1.5 is the #1-ranked image-to-video model on Artificial Analysis, generating 720p clips with native audio at $0.14/s - 86% cheaper than Sora 2 Pro.
Dreamina Seedance 2.0
ByteDance's top-ranked AI video generation model with native joint audio-video synthesis, multi-shot support, and multimodal reference inputs across up to 12 files per generation.
Wan 2.7
Alibaba's open-source video generation model with MoE architecture, native audio, first-and-last-frame control, and 1080p output up to 15 seconds.
HappyHorse-1.0
HappyHorse-1.0 is Alibaba's 15-billion-parameter video generation model that ranked #1 on Artificial Analysis, producing 720p-1080p clips with joint audio-video synthesis in a single forward pass.
SkyReels V4
SkyReels V4 is Skywork AI's unified multi-modal video model that jointly generates 1080p/32FPS video and synchronized audio from a single dual-stream diffusion transformer.
Sora 2
OpenAI's Sora 2 generates physics-accurate video with synchronized audio from text or images, available API-only until its September 24, 2026 sunset.
Runway Gen-4.5
Runway's Gen-4.5 is a video generation model built on an Autoregressive-to-Diffusion architecture that held the top Artificial Analysis Elo position at launch with 1,247 points before Seedance 2.0 and Kling 3.0 surpassed it in early 2026.
