# Unisound U2: The 266B Model That Scored 87.9% on PhD-Level Science for $0.15/M

> 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: 2026-07-12 22:01:01+00:00

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# Unisound U2: The 266B Model That Scored 87.9% on PhD-Level Science for $0.15/M

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…