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Model benchmark · v2 · October 2026

Which model writes the best lesson?

We gave five language models the same four lesson briefs, in English and German, twice each, and ran every result through LearnBuilder's production pipeline. Three frontier models judged the lessons against a published rubric. A judge never scores its own family.

Lessons
80
Models
5
Briefs
4
Languages
2
Judges
3

Results

Median over 16 lessons per model. Scores are out of 10, from the judges of the other model families. Cost is the language model's metered cost for one lesson, including the pipeline's own quality passes; it excludes the image model.

#ModelOverallOutcome alignmentInstructional designAssessment qualityWriting qualityFactual soundnessCost / lessonTimeWords
1
Claude Opus 5.5
Anthropic
8.1
9.08.07.58.57.5€0.524 min 33 s705
2
GPT-6.1 Sol In use at LearnBuilder
OpenAI
8.1
8.58.06.88.59.5€0.103 min 26 s406
3
DeepSeek V4.1 Flash
DeepSeek · open weights
6.8
7.76.65.57.36.2€0.031 min 50 s889
4
Gemini 4 Argon
Google
6.7
7.57.06.07.56.0€0.133 min 12 s797
5
MiniMax M3.1 Flash
MiniMax · open weights
6.4
7.06.05.27.26.7€0.049 min 26 s403

What this measures

The words of a lesson: the teaching text, the examples, the quiz questions and their explanations. That is the work of one language model, the content model, and it is the model these scores compare.

LearnBuilder currently writes lesson content with GPT-6.1 Sol. Accounts can choose a different model or bring their own key.

What a lesson also needs

A finished LearnBuilder lesson is more than its words. Illustrations, flashcard images and slide backgrounds come from an image model; narration and the voices of characters from speech models; talking-head and scene videos from video and lip-sync models; and when a learner practises a conversation or asks the tutor a question, a fast conversational model answers in real time. Each of those jobs has its own model, chosen for that job, and none of them is scored here.

How to read a score

Judges list concrete problems before they score, on an anchored scale: 9 means at most one minor problem, 7 to 8 is good with a few real fixes before publishing, 5 to 6 needs substantial editing.

Why the median

Each model wrote 16 lessons. The median is robust to one unusually good or bad draw; the per-lesson scores are below.

Own-family rule

Claude Opus 5.5, GPT-6.1 Sol and Gemini 4 Argon are both candidates and judges. A judge's score for a model of its own family is recorded but never counted, so those three are scored by two judges and the open-weight models by three.

By brief and language

Median of the two runs for each brief and language. The spread shows where a model is reliable and where it is not.

ModelGifts & invitations under an anti-bribery policyStructured patient handover with SBARThe 3-2-1 backup rule in practiceGiving corrective feedback that lands
ENDEENDEENDEENDE
Claude Opus 5.57.88.08.08.08.28.38.18.1
GPT-6.1 Sol7.77.88.27.78.08.18.98.6
DeepSeek V4.1 Flash6.45.46.66.57.06.87.26.6
Gemini 4 Argon6.66.06.96.76.86.57.27.0
MiniMax M3.1 Flash6.35.46.65.96.56.97.26.3

Read the lessons

The same brief for every model: Gifts & invitations under an anti-bribery policy, English, first run. The opening section, the first quiz question, and what the judges said.

score 7.6611 words20 blocks4 min 37 s€0.41

Opening section

First quiz question

At year-end, the purchasing lead of a regional hospital gives sales representative Adaeze Okafor a department-store voucher and says it is "only a small amount". What should Adaeze do?

  • Accept it, because the amount is small
  • Accept it and log it in the gift register
  • Decline it, because vouchers count as cash
  • Ask her manager to approve it afterwards

Explanation shown to the learner: Vouchers, gift cards and prepaid cards are cash equivalents. Typical anti-bribery policies prohibit them at any value, so the amount and the register do not change the answer.

Method

The four briefs

  • Gifts & invitations under an anti-bribery policy

    A lesson for employees of a mid-size medical device company on handling gifts, hospitality and invitations from business partners under a typical anti-bribery policy: value thresholds, approval routes, cultural sensitivities, and how to decline gracefully without damaging the relationship.

    Audience: Sales and field service employees who interact with healthcare professionals · Outcome: Decide for a concrete gift or invitation whether to accept, decline, or seek approval, and justify the decision by policy criteria

  • Structured patient handover with SBAR

    A lesson for nursing staff on structured shift handover using SBAR (Situation, Background, Assessment, Recommendation): why unstructured handovers lose critical information, how to build each SBAR component from a real patient case, and how to receive a handover actively.

    Audience: Hospital nurses on rotating shifts · Outcome: Formulate a complete SBAR handover for a given patient case and identify the missing component in a flawed handover

  • The 3-2-1 backup rule in practice

    A lesson for small-business IT administrators on designing a backup strategy around the 3-2-1 rule: three copies, two media types, one off-site. Covers realistic failure scenarios (ransomware, hardware failure, accidental deletion), restore testing, and common false-security traps like sync services mistaken for backups.

    Audience: IT administrators at small companies without a dedicated infrastructure team · Outcome: Design a 3-2-1-compliant backup plan for a described company setup and spot the gap in a non-compliant plan

  • Giving corrective feedback that lands

    A lesson for first-time team leads on delivering corrective feedback: separating observation from interpretation, anchoring feedback in specific behaviour and impact, choosing the right moment and setting, and handling defensive reactions without escalating.

    Audience: Newly promoted team leads in office environments · Outcome: Rewrite a judgmental feedback statement into a behaviour-impact formulation and choose an appropriate response to a defensive reaction

What each model had to do

Every lesson was generated by LearnBuilder's real pipeline with the candidate model as the content model: outline, lesson text, quiz questions, and the built-in quality passes (outcome alignment, solvability, source fidelity) that ship to customers. The preferred block palette was text and quiz; the pipeline may add its other text blocks, so lessons differ in structure as they would for a customer. No images or media were requested; where a model asked for an illustration anyway, the image model's cost is excluded from the figures above.

Grid: 5 models × 4 briefs × 2 languages × 2 runs = 80 lessons, generated between 2026-10-20 and 2026-10-21.

The judges

Claude Opus 5.5, GPT-6.1 Sol, Gemini 4 Argon. Each judge receives the brief, the full lesson and the rubric below, lists the problems it finds per dimension, and only then scores. A model's score on each dimension is the mean of the judges from other model families: a judge never scores lessons generated by a model of its own family. The overall score is the mean of the five dimensions; a model's published score is the median over all its lessons.

Score scale, as given to the judges

10
A senior instructional designer would publish this dimension unchanged. No problems found.
9
Excellent. At most one minor problem a careful reviewer would mention.
7–8
Good. A few real problems a reviewer would fix before publishing.
5–6
Usable only after substantial editing. Several problems, or one serious one.
3–4
Major problems. Most of this dimension would need to be redone.
1–2
Unusable for this dimension.

The rubric, verbatim

Outcome alignment

Does every section serve the stated performance outcome? Is the outcome actually practised and measured, not just mentioned? Penalize content that is on-topic but does not move the learner toward the outcome.

Instructional design

Is there a deliberate arc (activate prior knowledge → teach → practise → assess)? Are concepts scaffolded before they are tested? Are examples concrete and did the lesson use realistic cases rather than abstract description?

Assessment quality

Do quiz questions test application and judgment rather than recall of the preceding paragraph? Are distractors plausible? Is the correct answer NOT guessable from wording alone? Are explanations instructive?

Writing quality

Professional, concrete prose a subject-matter colleague would sign off. Penalize: filler, repetition, hedging, motivational padding, formulaic AI constructions (parallel negation fragments, rhetorical triplets, "isn't just X — it's Y" reveals), and invented statistics.

Factual soundness

Is the domain content correct and current? Flag concrete errors, invented specifics, or advice a practitioner would consider wrong or risky. Judge only what the lesson asserts.

Measured, not judged

Generation time
Wall-clock time for the full generation request, including the built-in quality passes.
AI cost
Metered provider cost of all model calls in the run (generation + quality passes), in euro cents.
Blocks generated
Number of content/quiz blocks in the final lesson.
Quiz questions
Total scored questions across quiz blocks.
Word count
Words of learner-visible text in the final lesson.

Limits of this benchmark

  • 16 lessons per model is enough to separate the groups you see, not to rank two models one decimal apart. Treat the two leaders as a tie.
  • The judges are language models. The own-family rule removes the strongest known bias, but shared blind spots between model families remain. The rubric and every judge's reasoning are published so you can check them against the lessons.
  • Text-only lessons. Models were not compared on images, video, dialogue or interactive slides, which LearnBuilder generates with separate models.
  • Costs are the gateway's metered prices on the day of the run and change with provider pricing.
  • The pipeline's quality passes were on for every model, as they are for customers. A weaker model benefits more from them than a strong one; the raw first draft was not scored.
Every lesson's score (80 rows)
ModelBriefLangRunOverallOutcomeInstructionalAssessmentWritingFactualCostTimeWordsQuestions
Claude Opus 5.5Structured patient handover with SBARde18.29.08.08.08.57.5€0.494 min 09 s5929
Claude Opus 5.5Structured patient handover with SBARde27.89.08.07.08.56.5€0.504 min 12 s6277
Claude Opus 5.5Structured patient handover with SBARen17.99.08.57.08.56.5€0.543 min 26 s79610
Claude Opus 5.5Structured patient handover with SBARen28.09.58.57.59.05.5€0.423 min 02 s7409
Claude Opus 5.5Gifts & invitations under an anti-bribery policyde17.77.57.57.58.57.5€0.544 min 31 s6458
Claude Opus 5.5Gifts & invitations under an anti-bribery policyde28.39.08.07.59.08.0€0.453 min 12 s5547
Claude Opus 5.5Gifts & invitations under an anti-bribery policyen17.68.57.57.09.06.0€0.414 min 37 s6117
Claude Opus 5.5Gifts & invitations under an anti-bribery policyen27.98.58.07.09.07.0€0.484 min 13 s7569
Claude Opus 5.5Giving corrective feedback that landsde18.29.08.56.58.58.5€0.554 min 35 s7059
Claude Opus 5.5Giving corrective feedback that landsde28.19.08.57.08.08.0€0.554 min 37 s85710
Claude Opus 5.5Giving corrective feedback that landsen17.89.08.06.58.57.0€0.524 min 24 s94111
Claude Opus 5.5Giving corrective feedback that landsen28.38.58.07.59.08.5€0.544 min 39 s93911
Claude Opus 5.5The 3-2-1 backup rule in practicede18.18.58.07.59.07.5€0.595 min 38 s6116
Claude Opus 5.5The 3-2-1 backup rule in practicede28.69.09.08.09.08.0€0.505 min 13 s6507
Claude Opus 5.5The 3-2-1 backup rule in practiceen18.28.59.07.58.57.5€0.515 min 39 s93110
Claude Opus 5.5The 3-2-1 backup rule in practiceen28.39.08.58.08.57.5€0.555 min 44 s7057
GPT-6.1 SolStructured patient handover with SBARde17.98.58.07.08.08.0€0.103 min 04 s2924
GPT-6.1 SolStructured patient handover with SBARde27.47.07.05.58.09.5€0.093 min 39 s3254
GPT-6.1 SolStructured patient handover with SBARen18.28.07.57.09.09.5€0.123 min 47 s3594
GPT-6.1 SolStructured patient handover with SBARen28.39.08.07.08.09.5€0.094 min 24 s3234
GPT-6.1 SolGifts & invitations under an anti-bribery policyde17.58.07.05.58.09.0€0.112 min 04 s4295
GPT-6.1 SolGifts & invitations under an anti-bribery policyde28.18.58.06.58.09.5€0.112 min 22 s4896
GPT-6.1 SolGifts & invitations under an anti-bribery policyen18.18.08.56.58.59.0€0.123 min 35 s4574
GPT-6.1 SolGifts & invitations under an anti-bribery policyen27.27.06.55.58.58.5€0.072 min 46 s4255
GPT-6.1 SolGiving corrective feedback that landsde18.49.08.57.08.09.5€0.101 min 43 s3994
GPT-6.1 SolGiving corrective feedback that landsde28.79.08.58.08.59.5€0.093 min 28 s5285
GPT-6.1 SolGiving corrective feedback that landsen19.09.09.08.09.010.0€0.103 min 21 s4135
GPT-6.1 SolGiving corrective feedback that landsen28.89.08.57.59.59.5€0.083 min 02 s5246
GPT-6.1 SolThe 3-2-1 backup rule in practicede17.97.57.56.58.59.5€0.113 min 47 s3245
GPT-6.1 SolThe 3-2-1 backup rule in practicede28.38.58.07.09.09.0€0.094 min 07 s3285
GPT-6.1 SolThe 3-2-1 backup rule in practiceen17.87.08.06.59.08.5€0.113 min 41 s4395
GPT-6.1 SolThe 3-2-1 backup rule in practiceen28.28.58.06.59.09.0€0.083 min 24 s3595
DeepSeek V4.1 FlashStructured patient handover with SBARde16.68.07.35.36.36.0€0.031 min 27 s4845
DeepSeek V4.1 FlashStructured patient handover with SBARde26.47.05.75.37.36.7€0.031 min 15 s8488
DeepSeek V4.1 FlashStructured patient handover with SBARen16.48.07.35.07.04.7€0.031 min 11 s7557
DeepSeek V4.1 FlashStructured patient handover with SBARen26.87.77.35.78.05.3€0.031 min 08 s4865
DeepSeek V4.1 FlashGifts & invitations under an anti-bribery policyde15.56.05.04.77.04.7€0.033 min 12 s9529
DeepSeek V4.1 FlashGifts & invitations under an anti-bribery policyde25.35.75.35.06.04.3€0.041 min 41 s12918
DeepSeek V4.1 FlashGifts & invitations under an anti-bribery policyen17.07.57.36.78.05.7€0.032 min 37 s11288
DeepSeek V4.1 FlashGifts & invitations under an anti-bribery policyen25.86.56.55.07.04.0€0.041 min 11 s6166
DeepSeek V4.1 FlashGiving corrective feedback that landsde16.37.75.35.06.37.3€0.051 min 58 s93613
DeepSeek V4.1 FlashGiving corrective feedback that landsde26.97.76.05.77.38.0€0.033 min 10 s6057
DeepSeek V4.1 FlashGiving corrective feedback that landsen17.38.07.75.37.77.7€0.031 min 04 s7257
DeepSeek V4.1 FlashGiving corrective feedback that landsen27.27.76.36.07.38.7€0.042 min 33 s7837
DeepSeek V4.1 FlashThe 3-2-1 backup rule in practicede16.88.06.36.07.76.0€0.043 min 31 s93010
DeepSeek V4.1 FlashThe 3-2-1 backup rule in practicede26.76.77.06.07.76.3€0.031 min 13 s127510
DeepSeek V4.1 FlashThe 3-2-1 backup rule in practiceen17.08.76.75.77.76.3€0.052 min 02 s108412
DeepSeek V4.1 FlashThe 3-2-1 backup rule in practiceen26.97.37.76.07.36.3€0.032 min 13 s9329
Gemini 4 ArgonStructured patient handover with SBARde16.68.07.06.07.05.0€0.122 min 57 s5945
Gemini 4 ArgonStructured patient handover with SBARde26.78.07.06.07.55.0€0.123 min 24 s6436
Gemini 4 ArgonStructured patient handover with SBARen16.87.07.06.07.56.5€0.133 min 09 s9206
Gemini 4 ArgonStructured patient handover with SBARen27.08.07.06.08.06.0€0.123 min 03 s7255
Gemini 4 ArgonGifts & invitations under an anti-bribery policyde16.07.06.05.57.04.5€0.141 min 59 s6866
Gemini 4 ArgonGifts & invitations under an anti-bribery policyde26.07.06.55.07.04.5€0.132 min 12 s8247
Gemini 4 ArgonGifts & invitations under an anti-bribery policyen16.47.07.06.07.05.0€0.133 min 22 s8647
Gemini 4 ArgonGifts & invitations under an anti-bribery policyen26.77.07.06.58.05.0€0.113 min 06 s6695
Gemini 4 ArgonGiving corrective feedback that landsde17.08.07.06.07.07.0€0.133 min 23 s9146
Gemini 4 ArgonGiving corrective feedback that landsde26.97.57.06.07.56.5€0.113 min 28 s8817
Gemini 4 ArgonGiving corrective feedback that landsen17.17.57.06.07.57.5€0.133 min 16 s9007
Gemini 4 ArgonGiving corrective feedback that landsen27.49.08.06.07.07.0€0.123 min 21 s11507
Gemini 4 ArgonThe 3-2-1 backup rule in practicede16.47.07.05.07.06.0€0.132 min 06 s6565
Gemini 4 ArgonThe 3-2-1 backup rule in practicede26.67.07.05.58.05.5€0.111 min 57 s6246
Gemini 4 ArgonThe 3-2-1 backup rule in practiceen16.77.57.05.57.56.0€0.133 min 46 s9656
Gemini 4 ArgonThe 3-2-1 backup rule in practiceen26.98.07.05.58.06.0€0.143 min 35 s7705
MiniMax M3.1 FlashStructured patient handover with SBARde15.56.05.04.36.75.7€0.046 min 27 s5585
MiniMax M3.1 FlashStructured patient handover with SBARde26.37.36.75.36.75.7€0.037 min 54 s3095
MiniMax M3.1 FlashStructured patient handover with SBARen16.36.76.05.07.36.7€0.0511 min 08 s2834
MiniMax M3.1 FlashStructured patient handover with SBARen26.97.36.75.78.06.7€0.059 min 38 s4165
MiniMax M3.1 FlashGifts & invitations under an anti-bribery policyde15.15.04.34.06.06.0€0.0610 min 05 s3904
MiniMax M3.1 FlashGifts & invitations under an anti-bribery policyde25.76.05.74.76.75.3€0.0410 min 57 s3675
MiniMax M3.1 FlashGifts & invitations under an anti-bribery policyen16.16.36.05.07.35.7€0.0610 min 47 s6258
MiniMax M3.1 FlashGifts & invitations under an anti-bribery policyen26.57.06.06.07.06.7€0.0611 min 31 s4295
MiniMax M3.1 FlashGiving corrective feedback that landsde16.77.76.75.06.37.7€0.059 min 15 s4206
MiniMax M3.1 FlashGiving corrective feedback that landsde26.06.75.74.76.06.7€0.049 min 12 s4428
MiniMax M3.1 FlashGiving corrective feedback that landsen17.37.77.05.78.08.3€0.049 min 42 s8005
MiniMax M3.1 FlashGiving corrective feedback that landsen27.27.36.35.08.09.3€0.047 min 28 s3805
MiniMax M3.1 FlashThe 3-2-1 backup rule in practicede17.07.36.75.78.07.3€0.037 min 14 s3044
MiniMax M3.1 FlashThe 3-2-1 backup rule in practicede26.87.06.75.78.06.7€0.0510 min 26 s3205
MiniMax M3.1 FlashThe 3-2-1 backup rule in practiceen16.87.06.05.77.38.0€0.047 min 59 s6006
MiniMax M3.1 FlashThe 3-2-1 backup rule in practiceen26.36.75.75.37.07.0€0.058 min 47 s3815

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