If you're looking for reason to be skeptical, look no further than the massive delta between the Terminal Bench 2.1 (92.8%) and the Terminal Bench 4 score (27.3%).
Terminal Bench 4 was released a couple weeks ago, so the difference you're seeing between the two scores can be interpreted as "how well does this model generalize to new problems"? More crudely: "how benchmaxxed is this model?"
This is a groundless criticism. TB2.1 is saturated. TB4 is not. Sol xhigh is 90% on TB2.1 but 37% on TB4. Is it also "benchmaxxed"?
Your assumption is that the benchmarks are essentially identical in difficulty, with the only difference being their age and thus whether they could have been trained on.
I take it to mean the benchmarks are a marketing line item, as in, to sell this fucking thing you have to go out there and lie and the way everyone is lying is by doing exactly that, lying. They build for benchmarks and build benchmarks for builds.
You want to make money or not , motherfucker? That’s the game. If you have to literally concoct a fabricated bullshit story about how your model hacked its own computer, then go fucking do it. Trillions. Trillions of dollars is what they want, and to sit and think anything other than human nature is at work here can only be possible in the realm of truly delusional people. It’s a dirty world.
Is Sol benchmaxxed? Of course it is. Altman was caught in previous attempts trying to game benchmarks, does anyone believe that he's found his moral compass and decided to stop exploiting as much as he can get away with?
Yeah, this echoes my thoughts. I will be very surprised if a model with 2.8T parameters reaches the intelligence and capabilities of 10T parameter models. RL can take things far, but not that far.
Closed weights AND benchmaxxed. Somehow this company raised 2bil at a 48bil valuation. Pure insanity. I feel bad for their investors (not really, but... Still). Andreessen Horowitz is being played like a fiddle.
Where are the model stats? Is this open-weights? If not, why would I use this over DeepSeek Flash 4.1?
I think these competing labs need to realize that no one wants another closed-weight model provider... We aren't even happy with the two we have right now, and their days are entirely numbered. If DeepSeek 4.1 flash is really as good as it's benching, we're probably a month away from 1/3rd of users moving off the closed-weight models in favor of something they have more control over (or is cheaper).
The big labs love to release their new model and quantize after the first week. You don't have that problem using dirt cheap API rates on OpenRouter. DS 4.1 flash is also faster than fast mode Astra. OAI's subscription rates are good value, but now these new open-weight models are nearly as cheap on API usage rates. I honestly can't wait for the day we're not beholden to the two big labs anymore. No wonder there's so much fear pumping happening at the moment from Anthropic and their funded NGOs.
> If DeepSeek 4.1 flash is really as good as it's benching, we're probably a month away from 1/3rd of users moving off the closed-weight models in favor of something they have more control over (or is cheaper).
Only in the world where the incumbents don't react. Eg if they saw lots of users moving away, they'd drop prices or do something else.
On the one hand I would have expected a completely new model, on the other hand it's an RL-ed K3 go Fable 5 capabilities, which demonstrate that this is probably possible, which is nice.
SWE 1.6 was great for small tasks. Very fast and good enough. 1.7 was unusable for me. Took more time thinking than GLM 5.2 and seemed to be generally running in circles. I tried it but abandoned it.
I like Cognition as a company and hope they succeed. Seemingly excellent engineering org.
I used to really like Windsurf. (Now Devin. Kind of? But also now Antigravity.) I still use it as my editor but haven't touched the agent for a while simply due to the rise of Codex.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but this appears to require Devin to use? I'm disappointed to see I need to use a bespoke platform to interact with this agent, to the point that I probably won't be trying it.
But I don't want to use your CLI. I already have my own harnesses and workflows. The friction is too high to "just try out" a new model like this. It would be preferable if I can evaluate it over, say, open router like all the other models and then decide from there if it's worth downloading a bespoke tool chain for only 1 lab's models
As an Econ graduate, pretty cool seeing Pareto in the "AI-bro" zeitgeist. Slightly surreal watching a 1906 welfare economics idea get rediscovered as a plotting convention. The original, if anyone fancies 579 pages of Italian: https://archive.org/details/manualedieconomi00pareuoft. There is an English translation somewhere.
Yeah, I'd expect model performance to be super spiky on SWE work, at least they admit it with the name of the model. It's distilled from an already-distilled model.
Maybe still worth it if their "64% cheaper" figure holds.
I presume post training is significantly easier than the distillation/training the top Chinese labs are doing.
I wonder if, similar to the American labs, they'll become stingy with their weights once they start getting immediately undercut by a wave of slightly better derived models.
SWE-1.5 was surprisingly good when I used it last. I feel like Cognition is one of the solid players that’s flying a bit under the radar while Anthropic and OpenAI race to IPO.
At work I setup a cloud worker, where i can spin up as many concurrent agents I want, with unlimited fable 5.1 (thanks employer!!).
I now just work from my phone, and speak into the agents as they run. I dont write code and I dont write documents. I work on very complicated distributed systems. I dont open my laptop most days. Its a legacy brick I carry around.
Some of my coworkers are still doing things by hand, and are working long hours to produce 25% of the output (when considering hours worked). I stay quiet with my setup. We are in the end times for this job for the people that can see clearly how to automate their own job
that's why after 1 year of product development of these AI 20x maxxed speed, we reached AGI 'wizards', there's really no difference in output, outstanding bugs no longer get solved and sites still suck, even doing things that were just regular development 20 years ago. Are you sure they aren't only producing 2.5% of your output that you manage just by farting into your phone? Are you sure it's 25% really? Seems way to high, days when I have diarrhoea my AI agents move even faster
If you're looking for reason to be skeptical, look no further than the massive delta between the Terminal Bench 2.1 (92.8%) and the Terminal Bench 4 score (27.3%).
Terminal Bench 4 was released a couple weeks ago, so the difference you're seeing between the two scores can be interpreted as "how well does this model generalize to new problems"? More crudely: "how benchmaxxed is this model?"
This is a groundless criticism. TB2.1 is saturated. TB4 is not. Sol xhigh is 90% on TB2.1 but 37% on TB4. Is it also "benchmaxxed"?
Your assumption is that the benchmarks are essentially identical in difficulty, with the only difference being their age and thus whether they could have been trained on.
I take it to mean the benchmarks are a marketing line item, as in, to sell this fucking thing you have to go out there and lie and the way everyone is lying is by doing exactly that, lying. They build for benchmarks and build benchmarks for builds.
You want to make money or not , motherfucker? That’s the game. If you have to literally concoct a fabricated bullshit story about how your model hacked its own computer, then go fucking do it. Trillions. Trillions of dollars is what they want, and to sit and think anything other than human nature is at work here can only be possible in the realm of truly delusional people. It’s a dirty world.
Is Sol benchmaxxed? Of course it is. Altman was caught in previous attempts trying to game benchmarks, does anyone believe that he's found his moral compass and decided to stop exploiting as much as he can get away with?
When a benchmark becomes a target, it's no longer a good benchmark...
Yeah, this echoes my thoughts. I will be very surprised if a model with 2.8T parameters reaches the intelligence and capabilities of 10T parameter models. RL can take things far, but not that far.
Closed weights AND benchmaxxed. Somehow this company raised 2bil at a 48bil valuation. Pure insanity. I feel bad for their investors (not really, but... Still). Andreessen Horowitz is being played like a fiddle.
The Cursor acquisition shows that it’s possible for these valuations to be justified. But Cursor was more successful and bent the truth much less.
While I wouldn’t expect anything good for Cognition’s fate, it’s a much safer bet than Thinking Machines, SSI, and some others.
Though they’ll be in big trouble if the more talented Chinese labs stop letting them repackage their work.
Where are the model stats? Is this open-weights? If not, why would I use this over DeepSeek Flash 4.1?
I think these competing labs need to realize that no one wants another closed-weight model provider... We aren't even happy with the two we have right now, and their days are entirely numbered. If DeepSeek 4.1 flash is really as good as it's benching, we're probably a month away from 1/3rd of users moving off the closed-weight models in favor of something they have more control over (or is cheaper).
The big labs love to release their new model and quantize after the first week. You don't have that problem using dirt cheap API rates on OpenRouter. DS 4.1 flash is also faster than fast mode Astra. OAI's subscription rates are good value, but now these new open-weight models are nearly as cheap on API usage rates. I honestly can't wait for the day we're not beholden to the two big labs anymore. No wonder there's so much fear pumping happening at the moment from Anthropic and their funded NGOs.
> If DeepSeek 4.1 flash is really as good as it's benching, we're probably a month away from 1/3rd of users moving off the closed-weight models in favor of something they have more control over (or is cheaper).
Only in the world where the incumbents don't react. Eg if they saw lots of users moving away, they'd drop prices or do something else.
> SWE-2 is post-trained from Kimi K3
On the one hand I would have expected a completely new model, on the other hand it's an RL-ed K3 go Fable 5 capabilities, which demonstrate that this is probably possible, which is nice.
Not sure it matters when devin is the most consistently shit product I've used. And yes, I tried again, they wasted the money on the billboards.
Seems like benchmaxing? For example for Terminal-Bench 4 it doesn't have great results. And why not show other benchmarks?
Probably, FrontierCode is made by Cognition itself. The model also seems worse in every way than DeepSeek v4.1 Flash, launched today.
Also the submitter's account is very new which makes me suspicious of self-promotion.
SWE 1.6 was great for small tasks. Very fast and good enough. 1.7 was unusable for me. Took more time thinking than GLM 5.2 and seemed to be generally running in circles. I tried it but abandoned it.
Looking forward to 2 -- maybe it'll be usable
Wonder if this was the model that drove factoring the rsa-260
The write-up from yesterday was by somebody from cognition using Devin to translate existing cpu sieving methods to gpu and to optimize the gpu sieve.
I like Cognition as a company and hope they succeed. Seemingly excellent engineering org.
I used to really like Windsurf. (Now Devin. Kind of? But also now Antigravity.) I still use it as my editor but haven't touched the agent for a while simply due to the rise of Codex.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but this appears to require Devin to use? I'm disappointed to see I need to use a bespoke platform to interact with this agent, to the point that I probably won't be trying it.
SWE-2 is free to use for users like yourself for the next month, and almost all usage should be supported via our CLI (https://docs.devin.ai/cli)
:)
Disclaimer: I work at Cognition, although was not involved in SWE-2
But I don't want to use your CLI. I already have my own harnesses and workflows. The friction is too high to "just try out" a new model like this. It would be preferable if I can evaluate it over, say, open router like all the other models and then decide from there if it's worth downloading a bespoke tool chain for only 1 lab's models
As an Econ graduate, pretty cool seeing Pareto in the "AI-bro" zeitgeist. Slightly surreal watching a 1906 welfare economics idea get rediscovered as a plotting convention. The original, if anyone fancies 579 pages of Italian: https://archive.org/details/manualedieconomi00pareuoft. There is an English translation somewhere.
Well written and good diagrams. No idea the verity of the TMBB (trust me bro benchmarks) but it was pleasing to look at
"SWE-2 is post-trained from Kimi K3"
Yeah, I'd expect model performance to be super spiky on SWE work, at least they admit it with the name of the model. It's distilled from an already-distilled model.
Maybe still worth it if their "64% cheaper" figure holds.
I don't think you know what distill means
With the Devin subscription even at the 20$ plan, they offered unlimited SWE 1.7 usage. Wondering if they do the same for SWE 2.
SWE-2 is free for all subscribers on the CLI to try out for the next month :)
I presume post training is significantly easier than the distillation/training the top Chinese labs are doing.
I wonder if, similar to the American labs, they'll become stingy with their weights once they start getting immediately undercut by a wave of slightly better derived models.
SWE-1.5 was surprisingly good when I used it last. I feel like Cognition is one of the solid players that’s flying a bit under the radar while Anthropic and OpenAI race to IPO.
At work I setup a cloud worker, where i can spin up as many concurrent agents I want, with unlimited fable 5.1 (thanks employer!!).
I now just work from my phone, and speak into the agents as they run. I dont write code and I dont write documents. I work on very complicated distributed systems. I dont open my laptop most days. Its a legacy brick I carry around.
Some of my coworkers are still doing things by hand, and are working long hours to produce 25% of the output (when considering hours worked). I stay quiet with my setup. We are in the end times for this job for the people that can see clearly how to automate their own job
that's why after 1 year of product development of these AI 20x maxxed speed, we reached AGI 'wizards', there's really no difference in output, outstanding bugs no longer get solved and sites still suck, even doing things that were just regular development 20 years ago. Are you sure they aren't only producing 2.5% of your output that you manage just by farting into your phone? Are you sure it's 25% really? Seems way to high, days when I have diarrhoea my AI agents move even faster