How We Test AI Models

By Abhishek Raj, CEO & Co-Founder · Updated May 2026

Our Testing Methodology

1. Pricing Verification

All model pricing on XALEN is sourced from official provider pricing pages and API documentation. We track pricing changes weekly and update our comparison pages within 24 hours of any provider price change. Prices are displayed per 1 million tokens in USD for consistent comparison across providers.

2. Latency Measurement

Latency figures represent Time-to-First-Token (TTFT) measured from XALEN's infrastructure in US-Central and Asia-South regions. We measure median latency across 100 requests with a standardized prompt of 50 tokens. Latency varies by load, time of day, and prompt complexity — our figures represent typical production conditions.

3. Context Window Verification

Context window sizes are taken from official model cards and documentation. We verify claims by testing with progressively longer inputs up to the stated limit. If a model's effective context differs from its stated context (a known issue with some models), we note this in our comparison.

4. Output Quality Assessment

For domain-specialist models (Vedika series), we evaluate output quality against our internal test suite of 500+ astrology queries with known-correct answers verified by domain experts. For general models, we reference published benchmarks (MMLU, HumanEval, GPQA) from the model provider and independent evaluations.

5. Language Support Testing

Indian language support is tested with a standardized evaluation set of 50 prompts per language across Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Odia, Punjabi, Assamese, Sinhala, Nepali, and Sanskrit. We measure fluency, accuracy, and script correctness for each model.

6. Domain-Specific Benchmarking

For faith-tech applications, we evaluate models on: astrological term accuracy, classical text citation correctness, temple domain knowledge, and spiritual content sensitivity. Our Vedika models are specifically trained and evaluated on these dimensions — general models are not penalized for lower domain performance but the difference is noted.

Update Frequency

Model comparison data is refreshed on the following schedule:

• Pricing: Weekly verification against provider documentation
• New models: Added within 48 hours of general availability
• Latency: Monthly re-measurement across all models
• Benchmarks: Updated when new evaluation results are published
• Deprecated models: Removed within 7 days of provider deprecation

Limitations & Transparency

We acknowledge that our comparisons have limitations:

• Parameter counts marked with "~" are estimates — exact counts are not always published by providers
• Latency measurements reflect XALEN infrastructure performance, which may differ from direct provider access
• XALEN is both a marketplace and a model provider (Vedika series) — we disclose this conflict of interest and strive for balanced comparisons
• Benchmark scores from external sources are cited as-is without independent verification

About the Author

Last updated: May 2026. Questions about our methodology? Email [email protected].