AI Foundations · Benchmark literacy after MMLU

How to read a model card honestly

You can read a 2026 model card, system card, or launch post and tell which document is doing which job — and where the spin sits.

Refreshed: May 2026.

When a frontier lab ships a model, they publish several documents at once, and the press treats them as interchangeable. They are not. Each has a different rigour, a different audience, and a different incentive to mislead. The literacy of this chapter is reading them as distinct artefacts.

Three lessons.

Chapter contains 3 lessons.