Decision models replace an LLM's "generate some text and you write the parser" with "you list the options up front and the model returns a probability for each." After TypeSafe proposed System One on 2026-09-15, this category went from one vendor to more than a dozen: Jev 1.14, the OpenAI Decisions API, Perplexity Decider v1.2, Microsoft-Decision-1, Liquid d1-ultra, Base Labs mammoth-1, vLLM d3, StartLux, Fastino GLiDE, Celeris-1 Decision, Inception Mercury Decide, and Cloudflare Clef. The two leaderboards disagree almost completely — the community Jev Decision Index 0.4.1 crown goes to GLiDE V1.2 (71.5), while the independent Artificial Analysis Decision Index crown goes to d1-ultra (65.2) with Jev 1.14 at only 57.1. Decision models win on classification and tool selection, lose on knowledge and reasoning, and are broadly overconfident.
pplx-embed is the embedding family Perplexity has been releasing since February 2026, in three lines: v1 single-vector (0.6B/4B, API at $0.004/$0.03 per 1M tokens), context embeddings (v1 plus a 9B v2 preview), and v2-late multi-vector (0.6B/9B, searches PDF page images directly). They solve different problems; v2 does not replace v1.
Gemma is Google's open-weights family paired with the closed-source Gemini flagship; Gemma 4 (E2B / E4B / 26B-MoE / 31B) released in April 2026 switched its license from Google Gemma Terms of Use to Apache 2.0 — the single most important change in this article.
Every serious image-to-video model in 2026 runs latent diffusion on a DiT backbone, so visual quality is no longer a useful axis for choosing one. The real axes are native audio, self-hostability, and dollars per second. Three widely-repeated errors worth correcting: Sora's app shut down on April 26 and its API goes on September 24; Wan 2.7 is described everywhere as Apache 2.0 open weights but no first-party source has them; Veo 3.1 officially costs $0.40/s, not the $0.75/s that circulates on review sites.