Models & Frontiers
What the new models can actually do, how they were trained, and whether the benchmarks mean anything. Open source vs closed, and where the research is heading.
Guides and explainers
Detailed guides and practical technical analysis.
Latest analysis
Recent research, benchmark reviews and technical updates.
Practical tools
Templates for budgets and project planning
BoredTools offers practical spreadsheets for budgets, freelance work and small projects.
How to Read AI Research Papers Without a PhD
A practical guide to reading AI research papers. Learn the three-pass method, spot red flags in benchmarks and methodology, and build a sustainable reading practice.
Attention Heads Are the New Inference Budget
Models that can technically process 128K tokens routinely fail on tasks requiring reasoning across 32K. That gap isn't a context window problem. It's an...
MoE's Dirty Secret Is Load Balancing
Every frontier lab now ships a sparse Mixture-of-Experts model. Google's Switch Transformer started the trend. DeepSeek-V3 proved it could scale....
Synthetic Data Won't Save You From Model Collapse
The AI industry's running out of internet. Every major lab's already scraped the same corpus, and the easy gains from scaling data are tapering. The...
MoE Models Run 405B Parameters at 13B Cost
When Mistral AI dropped Mixtral 8x7B in December 2023, claiming GPT-3.5-level performance at a fraction of the compute cost, the reaction split cleanly...
The Inference Budget Just Got Interesting
OpenAI's o1 made headlines for "thinking harder" during inference. But the real story isn't that a model can spend more tokens on reasoning: it's that...
Mixture of Experts Explained: The Architecture Behind Every Frontier Model
Every frontier model released in the last 18 months uses Mixture of Experts. DeepSeek-V3 activates just 37 billion of its 671 billion parameters per token. Understanding how MoE works isn't optional anymore.
Inference-Time Compute Is Escaping the LLM Bubble
Explore how inference-time compute scaling lets AI models think longer and reason deeper, boosting accuracy without retraining.
DeepSeek Explained: How a Chinese Lab Rewrote AI Economics
DeepSeek's R1 matched OpenAI's o1 on math and coding benchmarks. The claimed training cost: $5.6 million. The real figure is more complicated, and more interesting.
China's Qwen Just Dethroned Meta's Llama as the World's Most Downloaded Open Model
The numbers don't lie. In 2025, Qwen became the most downloaded model series on Hugging Face, ending Meta's Llama reign as the default choice for open-sour