oxbox

Survey

The Oxbox Survey

A recurring look at the free, stealth and cheap models on offer, what they cost you in data and tokens to verify their output, and a summary of using them with oxbox on a series of tasks.

Read this before trusting a number here. The survey ranks models, and ranking is judgment. Much of the evidence is vendor-reported benchmarks that nobody has audited. Every claim carries one of three labels:

TierSourceHow far to trust it
MeasuredCatalog captures from the venue's own APIReproducible. You can re-run the fetcher and check it yourself.
Observedoxbox run logs, findings verified by experimentReal, but small-sample and specific to one reviewer's repos.
ReportedVendor benchmark tables, community testsThe vendor's word, not verified by me.

Every model the survey has run appears in a catalog table with three measured 0 to 5 digits, quality, cost, and speed, bucketed by a script from recorded values and never typed by hand. A dash means unmeasured, not zero. Beside them sit a dated disqualifier, an access or venue fact that holds a model out of the manifest whatever its rating, and my Editor's Rating: Good, Acceptable, Marginal, or Poor, always the word and never a color, with a date and a one-line why. A model nobody has run is never rated.

The rating is an opinion built on those, not a test result. oxbox has a test count behind every claim; the survey cannot.

Issues come out periodically and carry the date they were written. Subscribe by RSS, or read the source repository, which also holds the catalog snapshots each issue is built from.

6 issues published