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Liquid AI released d1-ultra on October 15, 2026. It is a hosted model that accepts text, images, or both and returns probabilities for typed decisions instead of composing a prose answer. Liquid reports a first-place score of 65 on the Artificial Analysis Decision Index.

What d1-ultra is

d1-ultra is built for applications that need a measurable decision: whether an image meets a specification, which category an item belongs to, how severe a condition is, or whether a case should be escalated. Its output is a probability for one or more questions, rather than a conversational explanation.

Liquid AI describes the approach this way: “Decision models answer questions about a situation with a probability for each possible answer.” That makes d1-ultra different from a conventional language model whose primary output is generated text. An application can use the probabilities directly in a threshold, routing rule, queue, or human-review workflow.

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The three request types

Request type What it returns Typical use
Noul A yes/no probability Pass/fail checks, eligibility decisions, or escalation triggers
Choice A selection among named labels Classification and routing
Score A position on an ordered scale Severity, quality, or risk scoring

Multiple questions can be evaluated against the same state. A single inspection could therefore ask separate yes/no, label-selection, and ordered-score questions about the same text and image.

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What the reported score of 65 means

Liquid AI says d1-ultra ranks first on the Artificial Analysis Decision Index with a score of 65. A contemporaneous display of that index showed d1-ultra at 65 and Jev 1.14 at 57, putting the reported gap at eight points.

This is a release-era benchmark claim, not a complete independent audit of every test. Liquid’s release does not provide a full per-test breakdown, so the composite should be treated as an indicator of performance on that index rather than proof that d1-ultra is best for every workload.

Do not confuse the Artificial Analysis composite with Liquid’s separate internal comparison of 112 evaluations. Those are different evaluation sets and should not be combined into one score.

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How image input and billing work

d1-ultra accepts text, images, or both. Images count as input tokens at the same rate as text. Liquid’s example uses a 1,024 by 1,024 image and a 32-by-32-patch accounting method, producing 1,536 input tokens.

Published token price

Item Published treatment
Input $0.042 per million tokens through Liquid AI’s API
Output No output-token charge
Image input Counted as input tokens at the same rate; a 1,024×1,024 example uses 1,536 tokens
Question billing Each question is billed as its own prompt, including the question text and all images

Repeating an image across five questions therefore bills the image input five times. Using the published example, one image-question pair contains 1,536 image tokens; at $0.042 per million tokens, that image portion is about $0.0000645 before adding the question text and any other input.

Vercel’s AI Gateway documentation describes the same input-only billing model and lists a 32,768-token context window for its d1-ultra route. The actual total for a request still depends on all text and images included in each separately billed question.

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Where you can access d1-ultra

Liquid AI API

Liquid’s hosted API is the primary access route described with the release. It is the direct option when you want to manage request construction, question types, authentication, and application-side thresholds yourself.

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Vercel AI Gateway

Vercel documents the model under the name liquid/d1-ultra. This route is useful when an application already uses the gateway’s provider abstraction, while retaining the documented 32,768-token context window and input-only billing description.

OpenRouter

OpenRouter lists a d1-ultra provider route. Liquid’s release originally described Vercel and OpenRouter support as forthcoming; Vercel has since published availability.

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Self-hosting status

The release says d1-ultra is based on a larger open-weight model than d1 and includes Liquid-specific customizations. It does not name that backbone or disclose a parameter count. No downloadable d1-ultra weights are announced in the cited release, so the documented deployment choices are hosted services rather than a confirmed local installation.

Where the model fits operational workflows

Visual inspection

For a circuit-board image, you could ask a Noul question such as whether the board meets a stated specification, then use the returned probability to pass clear cases and send borderline cases to a technician.

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Insurance-claim checking

A customer photograph and claim details can be evaluated with a yes/no consistency question, a Choice question for claim category, and a Score question for apparent damage severity. The probabilities can feed an existing review queue instead of requiring a generated narrative for every claim.

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Routing, moderation, and guardrails

Typed decisions are also suited to classification, moderation, policy guardrails, triage, and deciding when a human must review an item. The application should define thresholds and fallback behavior; a probability is an input to a policy, not the policy itself.

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When a decision model is preferable to a prose model

Need Why d1-ultra’s format can help
Threshold-based automation Probabilities can be compared directly with an application threshold.
Consistent labels or scales Choice and Score constrain the answer space instead of requiring text parsing.
Image-based decisions Text and visual evidence can be supplied in the same request.
Lower response overhead No output tokens are charged by the published Liquid pricing, and the model need not generate an explanation for every item.
Need for an explanation A conventional language model or a separate explanation step may still be necessary, because d1-ultra’s documented output is the decision probability.

The benchmark score does not by itself establish calibration for your domain. Before automating a consequential decision, measure false positives, false negatives, and probability calibration on representative, labeled data.

Implementation checklist

  1. Define the decision contract: a yes/no question, named labels, or an ordered scale.
  2. Specify the evidence that will be sent as text, images, or both, and keep the question wording stable for evaluation.
  3. Choose a hosted route: Liquid’s API, Vercel AI Gateway with liquid/d1-ultra, or the listed OpenRouter route.
  4. Account for every question separately when estimating token cost, especially if the same image is reused.
  5. Set thresholds for automatic action, manual review, and rejection rather than treating every probability as an automatic answer.
  6. Evaluate on your own labeled examples and monitor drift, disagreement, and escalation volume after deployment.

Known limits and unanswered details

  • The 65 score is a reported Artificial Analysis Decision Index result, and the release does not include a complete independent per-test breakdown.
  • The index result is separate from Liquid’s internal 112-evaluation comparison.
  • The model’s underlying backbone, parameter count, and downloadable d1-ultra weights are not disclosed in the cited release.
  • Hosted access introduces provider, availability, and data-handling considerations that must be checked against the requirements of your application.

Bottom line

d1-ultra is aimed at systems that need probability-bearing decisions from text and images, not a chatbot-style paragraph. Liquid’s reported score of 65 makes it notable at release, while the $0.042-per-million-input-token price, separate billing for each question, and hosted-only access documented so far are the practical factors to assess before adoption.

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