Glossary
Every term used in Frontier Notes is defined once, here. Articles link these definitions; they never redefine them.
- Measured quality
- A model's average mark on our private exam for one kind of work. Never called intelligence — it is an exam score with a margin of error.
- Required quality (quality floor)
- The minimum measured quality acceptable for a workload. Everything above the floor is a candidate; the cheapest candidate usually wins.
- Economic frontier
- The set of measured options not dominated on quality and cost at the same time — nothing else is both better and cheaper.
- Frontier leader
- The economically preferred option for one kind of work given a specific quality requirement.
- Candidate
- A model or strategy under evaluation for inclusion.
- Audition
- The exam a newly available model sits for the kinds of work it looks suited to.
- Canary
- A small weekly sample (four items) run against the stored measurement. It detects collapse, not one-point movement.
- Held
- A canary verdict: the weekly mean did NOT fall below the stored interval's lower bound. Drift detection is one-sided — a cluster scoring above its stored interval still holds. Held is a floor, not a promise of the old quality.
- Drift
- A canary verdict: the weekly mean fell below the stored interval. The routed pick does not change on a drift flag — the cluster is re-measured in full, which may reconfirm the same pick. Not every noisy movement is drift.
- Frontier tax
- Excess spend relative to the current measured frontier — what a team pays above the cheapest option that clears its floor.
- Stale-model tax
- Frontier tax arising from an outdated inference decision that nobody re-measured.
- Frontier half-life
- The measured persistence of economically optimal inference choices — how long the best answer stays the best answer.
- Launch hit rate
- The share of newly evaluated releases that meaningfully improve an existing frontier.
- Overbought inference
- Inference capability materially above the workload's actual requirement — quality you pay for and cannot measure in your outcomes.
How the numbers themselves are made: methodology.