Phantom Notes.
Field intelligence on AI models, agents, and enterprise IT. Verified numbers stated as facts, vendor numbers labeled as vendor numbers. By T.W. Ghost.
SEP 24, 2026
Jev Is Not an LLM, and Vercel Says Nearly 13% of Paid Teams Tried It in a Day. The 444x Is TypeSafe's Own Math.
TypeSafe AI came out of stealth on September 15 with $40 million from DCVC and Jev, a model that answers typed questions with probabilities and generates nothing. Vercel put it on AI Gateway the next day and says nearly 13% of paid teams used it within 24 hours, the fastest adoption in Gateway history. The 193.6x and 444.6x headlines are TypeSafe's own numbers against its own workflows; on accuracy, TypeSafe's evals table and the independent tests both put Jev level with mid-price LLMs and behind the frontier.
AI Tools12 min read→Nº 56AUG 15, 2026
Seedance 2.5 Makes 30-Second Movies With Sound. The 4K Claim Is Marketing.
ByteDance's new video model generates 30 seconds of picture and audio in one pass, takes 50 reference files, and edits existing footage by timestamp. We verified the specs against every live API: the real output caps at 720p, the price is up roughly 50% over Seedance 2.0, and the new model has no independent leaderboard score yet. The current champion is its own predecessor.
AI Tools11 min read→Nº 38MAY 10, 2026
Grok Imagine Quality Mode: xAI's Enterprise Play in Image Generation
xAI's Grok Imagine Quality Mode launched May 6, 2026 with stronger realism, multilingual text rendering, and tighter brand control. They rank #3 on Text-to-Image Arena at 1223 ELO, behind OpenAI (1398) and Google (1268), but they shipped the right enterprise features.
AI Tools5 min read→Nº 37APR 23, 2026
GPT-5.5 Ships at Double the Price: The Benchmark Picture Is More Mixed Than OpenAI's Marketing
OpenAI shipped GPT-5.5 on April 23, 2026 with a "new class of intelligence" pitch, claiming #1 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index and a +13 point lead on Terminal-Bench 2.0. But SWE-Bench Pro still goes to Claude Opus 4.7, MCP Atlas still goes to Opus and Gemini, and the API price just doubled to $5/$30 per million tokens. Here's the honest breakdown of wins, losses, and when GPT-5.5 actually beats the alternatives.
AI Tools8 min read→Nº 36APR 22, 2026
ChatGPT Images 2.0: The First Image Model That Thinks, and What That Actually Buys You
OpenAI shipped gpt-image-2 on April 21, 2026. It is the first image model with web search, layout reasoning, multi-image batching, and output verification baked in. Up to 2K resolution, 8-image consistent batches, best-in-class non-Latin text, and a +316 point Arena jump on text rendering. Here's what actually works, where it still breaks, and how it lands against Nano Banana 2, Flux, and Midjourney.
AI Tools8 min read→Nº 35APR 21, 2026
OpenAI's Codex Becomes a Super-App: Computer Use, Atlas Browser, Image Gen, and 111 Plugins
On April 16, 2026 OpenAI repositioned Codex from agentic coding assistant to full developer workstation. Computer Use on macOS, an embedded Atlas browser, gpt-image-1.5 inline, 90-plus curated plugins, scheduled automations, and memory preview. Here's what shipped and how it compares to Claude Code.
AI Tools8 min read→Nº 34APR 19, 2026
MemPalace: The Local-First AI Memory System With 48,000 Stars
MemPalace stores verbatim AI conversations as a searchable knowledge graph on your own machine. No API keys, no cloud, 29 MCP tools, 96.6% retrieval recall. Here is what it does, how it compares to Claude Code memory and LightRAG, and when to use which.
AI Tools9 min read→