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On 7 June 2026, a Chinese speech-AI company that most people outside China have never heard of released a large language model that scored 87.9% on GPQA Diamond, the graduate-level science benchmark built specifically to be Google-proof, and priced it at $0.15 per million input tokens and $0.30 per million output tokens. That is frontier-territory reasoning at commodity pricing. The model is called Unisound U2, and almost nobody wrote about it.
Sit with the score for a second. GPQA Diamond is the hard subset of a test where the questions are written by domain PhDs and validated to defeat non-experts even with a search engine and unlimited time. Frontier flagship models live in the mid-to-high 80s on it. U2 posts 87.9. Then look at the price tag, which is roughly what you would expect to pay for a small open-weight model you run yourself, not for something that answers PhD chemistry.
So either the number is inflated, or a company best known for voice assistants in Chinese hospitals quietly shipped one of the best intelligence-per-dollar models on the planet and let it sink without a ripple. This piece is about which of…