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99% Quality at 1.4% of the Price: What's Wrong with the AI Model Market

8 min read

Most managers pick an AI model the same way: grab the most expensive one available. The logic makes sense – pricier means better. That’s how enterprise software worked for the last twenty years.

The AI model market in 2026 works differently. The cost per query ranges from $0.0001 to $0.17 – three orders of magnitude. And the actual quality difference between the top ten models? 0.24 points on a five-point scale. Meanwhile, Wharton / GBK Collective reports that a third of corporate AI projects never get past the pilot stage. And Epoch AI shows that only 5.6% of users apply AI in any genuinely deep way.

Maybe the question isn’t which model is best, but whether paying a premium delivers proportionally better results for typical management tasks.

We tested it. The answer was harsher than we expected.

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99% Quality at 1.4% of the Price: What's Wrong with the AI Model Market
GigaChat Ultra Thinking: Thinks Longer – Answers Worse?
7 min

GigaChat Ultra Thinking: Thinks Longer – Answers Worse?

GigaChat Ultra Thinking takes longer to think and uses more compute. It solves management tasks 3.3% worse than the version without reasoning. This is not a bug or a fluke – it’s a pattern documented in academic papers over the past two years.

This week, Sber unveiled GigaChat Ultra – a new flagship model with a reasoning mode (Thinking). The model is available for free via web, mobile apps, and a Telegram bot. We immediately added both variants to our AI model research for managers: ran them through all 32 scenarios using our unified methodology, scored them with both LLM judges, and compared against the other 52 models.

GLM-5 Review: Chat.z.ai Pricing, Benchmarks & Agent Mode (2026)
13 min

GLM-5 Review: Chat.z.ai Pricing, Benchmarks & Agent Mode (2026)

On February 6, 2026, an anonymous model called “Pony Alpha” appeared on OpenRouter – free, with zero details about its creators. The AI community immediately set about identifying it. Its coding abilities came remarkably close to Claude Opus 4.5. When asked “who are you?”, the model responded: “I am GLM.” But when prompted to write a web page describing itself – it wrote: “I am Claude, created by Anthropic.”

GigaChat in 2026: Honest Review – Is It Worth Using for Work?
13 min

GigaChat in 2026: Honest Review – Is It Worth Using for Work?

GigaChat is a generative AI model from Sber – Russia’s largest bank and technology conglomerate (comparable to a combination of Chase, Google, and Amazon in the Russian market). GigaChat is built specifically for Russian-language audiences and trained on Russian data, with deep understanding of cultural context, slang, and the nuances of the Russian language. It works without a VPN from Russia and CIS countries.