AI Safety Leaderboard: Refusal and Jailbreak Rankings
Rankings of AI models by safety metrics including refusal rates, jailbreak resistance, bias scores, and truthfulness across major benchmarks.
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
AI Voice and Speech Leaderboard: TTS and STT Rankings
Rankings of the best text-to-speech and speech-to-text AI models by naturalness, accuracy, latency, and pricing.
Best AI Presentation Tools in 2026
Compare the best AI presentation tools of 2026 including Gamma, Beautiful.ai, Tome, and Canva AI with pricing, features, and design quality.
AI Speed and Latency Leaderboard: Tokens/s Rankings
Rankings of the fastest AI models and inference providers by tokens per second, time to first token, and end-to-end latency.
Best AI Data Analysis Tools in 2026
Compare the best AI data analysis tools of 2026 including Julius AI, ChatGPT Code Interpreter, and Claude analysis with pricing and features.
Small Language Model Leaderboard: Best Under 10B
Rankings of the best small language models under 10 billion parameters, comparing Phi-4, Gemma 3, Qwen 3.5, and more across key benchmarks.
Embedding Model Leaderboard: MTEB Rankings March 2026
Rankings of the best embedding models by MTEB scores, comparing retrieval quality, dimensions, speed, and pricing for RAG and search.
Best AI Meeting Assistants in 2026
Compare the best AI meeting assistants of 2026 including Otter, Fireflies, Granola, and tl;dv with pricing, features, and recommendations.
Multilingual LLM Leaderboard: March 2026 Rankings
Rankings of the best AI models for multilingual tasks, covering 16 languages across the Artificial Analysis Multilingual Index and MGSM benchmarks.
75% of AI Coding Agents Break Working Code Over Time
Alibaba's SWE-CI benchmark tested 18 AI models on 100 real codebases across 233 days of maintenance. Most agents accumulate technical debt and break previously working code. Only Claude Opus stays above 50% zero-regression.
Qwen3.5-27B Claude Opus Distilled
Community fine-tune that distills Claude Opus 4.6 reasoning into Qwen3.5-27B via LoRA. 28B parameters, Apache 2.0, no published benchmarks.
Qwen3.5-27B Distilled vs Base: What You Gain
Comparing the Claude Opus reasoning-distilled Qwen3.5-27B against the base model - what chain-of-thought distillation adds and what it costs in context, multimodal, and reliability.
