AI model families.
Each on its merits.

No, and we have no commercial reason to. We hold no reseller or partner agreement with any model provider, so the recommendation is not worth anything to us beyond being right. In practice we run three or four candidates against your task and the result is frequently that two of them would work and the choice comes down to price or an infrastructure relationship you already have.

The shortlist changes roughly every two quarters; the decision procedure does not. That is why we build systems where the model sits behind an interface — swapping a family should be an evaluation run and a config change, not a rewrite. Systems whose prompts are entangled with one model version do not survive a deprecation cycle.

Usually you should. Routing straightforward requests to a small or open model and reserving a frontier model for the genuinely hard minority is the single largest cost lever available, and it typically costs nothing in quality when the routing is measured rather than guessed. See hybrid model routing for how the gate is built.

Then the closed families are out and the decision is made among the open-weight ones, running on hardware you control. That is a real capability trade-off and we would rather state it than paper over it — though the gap has narrowed enough that for many production tasks it no longer decides anything.