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

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.

Member-only story 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…