{"slug": "unisound-u2-the-266b-model-that-scored-87-9-on-phd-level-science-for-0-15-m", "title": "Unisound U2: The 266B Model That Scored 87.9% on PhD-Level Science for $0.15/M", "summary": "Chinese speech-AI company Unisound released the U2 large language model on June 7, 2026, scoring 87.9% on the GPQA Diamond graduate-level science benchmark while pricing it at $0.15 per million input tokens, a fraction of typical costs for frontier models. The achievement suggests Unisound has created one of the most cost-effective high-performance AI models, though it has received little media attention.", "body_md": "Member-only story\n\n# Unisound U2: The 266B Model That Scored 87.9% on PhD-Level Science for $0.15/M\n\nOn 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.\n\nSit 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.\n\nSo 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…", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/unisound-u2-the-266b-model-that-scored-87-9-on-phd-level-science-for-0-15-m", "canonical_source": "https://pub.towardsai.net/unisound-u2-the-266b-model-that-scored-87-9-on-phd-level-science-for-0-15-m-c64034f37fd7?source=rss----98111c9905da---4", "published_at": "2026-07-12 22:01:01+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-12 22:39:56.619885+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["large-language-models", "artificial-intelligence", "ai-products", "ai-infrastructure"], "entities": ["Unisound", "Unisound U2", "GPQA Diamond"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/unisound-u2-the-266b-model-that-scored-87-9-on-phd-level-science-for-0-15-m", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/unisound-u2-the-266b-model-that-scored-87-9-on-phd-level-science-for-0-15-m.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/unisound-u2-the-266b-model-that-scored-87-9-on-phd-level-science-for-0-15-m.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/unisound-u2-the-266b-model-that-scored-87-9-on-phd-level-science-for-0-15-m.jsonld"}}