Union Alpha tops blind three.js painting test against DeepSeek v4.1 Flash and Muse Spark 1.3

thehype. @thehypedotnewsOriginally posted 2026.09.18

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union alpha (unbiased pareto) vs deepseek v4.1 flash vs muse spark 1.3 – three paintings in three.js the setup: one four-line prompt plus the painting as an image, through @openrouter. no agent loop, no renders, no feedback – the model writes one html file blind and we open it. @threejs from a cdn, every texture generated in code. when a provider cut the stream early we sent the partial back and said continue exactly where you stopped tasks: 1. the starry night – van gogh, 1889 2. the persistence of memory – dalí, 1931 3. poppies at argenteuil – monet, 1873 two rules in every brief: keep the painting's palette, brushwork and mood, and reply with the code only models: @theunbiasedco union alpha (stealth, free), @deepseek_ai deepseek v4.1 flash, @aiatmeta muse spark 1.3 total cost, three scenes #1 union alpha – free (list price: $1.04) #2 muse spark 1.3 – $0.117 #3 deepseek v4.1 flash – $0.162 generation time, three scenes #1 muse spark 1.3 – 4m 45s #2 deepseek v4.1 flash – 11m 30s #3 union alpha – 29m 13s total completion tokens #1 muse spark 1.3 – 26,502 #2 union alpha – 123,756 #3 deepseek v4.1 flash – 156,028 lines of code shipped #1 muse spark 1.3 – 862 #2 union alpha – 1,715 #3 deepseek v4.1 flash – 2,816 observations: • union alpha reads the painting like an art historian. it named every work unprompted, then broke each into parts: dalí's watches deformed along a bezier curve, monet's poppies as instanced brush dabs under a wind shader. no other model went that deep on a one-shot • it is the only model that made the paintings move the way they were painted. in the monet, the woman and the child walk the field on catmull-rom paths, pollen drifts, poppies are brush dabs in a point shader that sway in the wind. deepseek and muse left the figures standing • its dalí is an inventory of the canvas: three soft clocks draped along one parametric curve, a drip falling off the hanging one, a fly, ants on the pocket watch as an instanced mesh. 17 named parts in all. nobody else drew the drip • its starry night is shader work end to end: shared glsl noise, a vortex field for the sky, billboarded shader quads for the moon and stars, a painterly surface shader for the hills, and windows that flicker on their own timers. the file reads like a demoscene entry, not a model output what union alpha is: • we asked it. the stealth window had closed a day after launch and the api answered: "this model was unbiased's pareto". pareto is from circuit & chisel, an ex-stripe team that raised $19.2m in sep 2025 per fortune, and now sells "frontier intelligence for 75% less" • pareto is not one model. per unbiased's site it "runs a mix of frontier and open source models against each other on every request" and keeps the best answer. that is the 300-second first token, the tokenizer listed as "other", and the missing reasoning field – a race, not a model • listed at $2.50 in and $7.50 out per million. our three scenes would have cost $1.04 – 6.4x deepseek, 8.9x muse. asked for its cutoff, it dated nothing past may 2025 follow @thehypedotnews for 24/7 ai news, analysis and breakdowns

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