James Kowalski

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
FLUX.2 [dev]

FLUX.2 [dev]

Black Forest Labs' 32B open-weight image model - the most powerful open alternative for text-to-image, editing, and multi-reference generation with up to 10 reference images.

FLUX.2 [klein] 9B

FLUX.2 [klein] 9B

Black Forest Labs' 9B parameter distilled image model - sub-second generation with higher quality than the 4B variant, 19.6 GB VRAM, non-commercial license.

FLUX.2 [klein] 4B

FLUX.2 [klein] 4B

Black Forest Labs' fastest open-source image generation model - 4B parameters, Apache 2.0 license, sub-second generation on consumer GPUs with 13GB VRAM.

Best AI Models for RAG - March 2026

Best AI Models for RAG - March 2026

Gemini 2.5 Flash leads RAG generation accuracy at 87% on LIT-RAGBench, while o3 tops multi-hop reasoning and Qwen3-235B is the best open-source option.

Italian-Legal-BERT

Italian-Legal-BERT

Italian-Legal-BERT is a 110M-parameter domain-adapted BERT model for Italian legal NLP, trained on 3.7GB of court decisions from Italy's National Jurisprudential Archive.

NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Super 120B-A12B

NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Super 120B-A12B

NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Super is a 120B-parameter open model with 12B active at inference, combining Mamba-2, LatentMoE, and Multi-Token Prediction for agentic workloads with a 1M token context window.

Grok 4

Grok 4

Grok 4 is xAI's frontier reasoning model, the first to break 50% on Humanity's Last Exam, with a 256K context window, $3/M input pricing, and a Heavy multi-agent variant built on 200,000 GPUs.