AI model selection

Choosing a model is a product decision, not a benchmark leaderboard exercise. How to evaluate models against your own tasks, how to weight cost, latency and quality for your users, and how to keep the choice reviewable when a better model ships next month.

Newsletter10 SEPT 2026

The AI cost trap

"Build first, optimize later" works for SaaS — and quietly bankrupts AI products. Why your most engaged users are the ones losing you the most money, and the pre-ship experimentation loop that stops you from locking in a 10x-too-expensive architecture.

Madalina Turlea

Article22 MAY 2026

What document extraction actually costs across 15 models

Two numbers that shouldn't coexist: an 11× cost gap between models on the same extraction task, and a 43-point accuracy gap on the same model driven by prompt structure alone. Cost is not a proxy for accuracy.

Madalina Turlea

Article15 MAY 2026

Which model should you run your LLM judge on?

The identical judge prompt scored 76.5% on one model and 50.0% on another in the same run. 26-point spread. Paying more does not buy accuracy — the best judge in the battle runs on a mid-tier Gemini for well under a cent a verdict.

Madalina Turlea

Article15 JAN 2026

The model selection blind spot: why the newest model is not always the best

Teams default to the newest model before checking whether it fits the task. Frontier models do not win every time — and accuracy, cost, and latency rarely peak in the same place.

Madalina Turlea

Article15 JAN 2026

Does the AI know what day it is? Cutoff dates, web search, and why models differ

Models do not know the current date and stop knowing the world at their cutoff. What the cutoff is, why web search is expensive, and the three dimensions that actually make models different.

Madalina Turlea

Article15 OCT 2025

3 model selection mistakes that are quietly burning your AI budget

Most teams pick their AI model on reputation, not data. Here are three model selection mistakes silently inflating your costs — and how to fix them.

Madalina Turlea

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