New Model Better at Everything, Vendor Unable to Name One Thing

Melbourne AI company Vosmere has released Vosmere 5, describing it in a launch post as “better at everything.” At a press briefing the following morning, the company was asked to name one thing.

“It’s a broad-spectrum uplift across the whole capability surface,” said VP of model strategy Colin Hasbury. “It’s not one thing. It’s everything.”

Asked to name a task Vosmere 5 can complete that Vosmere 4 could not, Hasbury said that was “not really how frontier models work any more.”

The launch post runs to 2,300 words and uses the word “frontier” fourteen times. It includes a bar chart in which the new model scores 91.4 against the previous model’s 91.2. The vertical axis begins at 90.

Vosmere published results on twelve benchmarks. The model improved on nine, held steady on two, and regressed on one, which appears in the appendix under “Areas of Continued Investment.”

Internal testers have described Vosmere 5 as “feeling sharper.” Asked to elaborate, one said you could just tell. Asked whether they had been told which model they were testing, they said yes.

Vosmere 5 is priced 20 per cent above Vosmere 4. The company attributes the difference to the increased capability.

“We ran it against our actual workload for a fortnight,” said Nadia Threlkeld, an engineering lead at a Vosmere customer. “Same answers. One of them was longer.”

Hasbury was asked a final time to name a single thing the model is better at. He said it was better at knowing when not to answer. He was asked for an example. He said he would follow up.

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