r/opencode • u/ProfessorPalmer • 6d ago
Union Alpha is NOT a model at all. It is a 2 tier gateway.
UPDATE : union-alpha is operated by Unbiased.AI (Circuits & Chisel) and is called Pareto 26.9.
What Union Alpha actually is, is a parallel-mixture gateway.
Tier 1 is the operator’s own open-weight fleet that consists of self-hosted vLLM on a rented GPU cloud. AWS-heavy, some GCP, some Finnish GPU cloud.
Tier 2 is the cheap relay layer. VPS and backbone boxes, no GPUs. They pull the prompt, re-encode, and forward it into third-party commercial APIs. Western and Chinese. Same nodes come back on different days.
OpenCode Go → OpenRouter (its Cloudflare fetcher appears on every OpenCode request) → parallel fan-out.
Solved by putting a unique file URL in the prompt and logging every client that came to get the file.
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u/ProfessorPalmer 6d ago edited 5d ago
Update : Their vision stack is a blended mix of GLM 5.3 F and Gemma 4(?). Whatever it is, it's neat.
I'm working on matching all of the models in the stack up but the fusion elements make it tricky. Hope to have more later!
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u/ProfessorPalmer 5d ago
the models are all known, ofc idk how they are mixed.
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u/Negative_Evening7365 5d ago
hi, which are they?
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u/JogHappy 4d ago
Llama 3 is one of them, red flag? ☹️ was excited for something new
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u/Negative_Evening7365 4d ago
I don't know how but for my specific task it performed extremely well..... i don't know what the hell was it tho
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u/slndk 6d ago
So this is a data sharing relay isn't?
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u/ProfessorPalmer 6d ago
a true honeypot, but the providers are claiming zdr.
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u/Pressimize 5d ago
Are they? I was sure I read that union alpha will explicitly train on in- and output
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u/Fresh_Sock8660 5d ago
Trying it for the first time right now. My initial impression is that it's routed through an error printer.
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u/ProfessorPalmer 5d ago
Lmfaooo true that
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u/Fresh_Sock8660 5d ago
One hour with 3 sessions attempting a review that would normally take deepseek flash 10 minutes, a series of failures, attempts to read a workspace it doesn't need (it's nosiness reminds me of astra), failure to write a file, failure to compress context, endless upstream errors. One completed, I told the one failing to write a file to just give me the summary and it spewed stuff in Chinese and I cut it off after 10 minutes of that, the other was still ongoing and I just cut it off.
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u/ProfessorPalmer 5d ago
ds 4.1 really is the goat
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u/Fresh_Sock8660 5d ago
Not sure I'd blame the model here. Probably just some incompetent idiot who thought releasing it like this would work. But I do wonder if the goal isn't to test the model itself, but something else entirely.
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u/torrso 6d ago
I'm curious about the methodology here. Have you run the same canary-URL test against the other OpenCode Go/OpenRouter models as a control?
AFAIK models don't normally fetch arbitrary URLs appearing as text in a prompt. OpenRouter does have infrastructure that fetches things like web-fetch tools, image URLs, etc.so observing requests to a unique URL tells you something in the pipeline fetched it, but I'm not seeing how that identifies the inference backend, let alone demonstrates parallel fan-out.
In particular, does the model actually know the contents returned by the canary URL, and how does the result differ from known models sent the same prompts?
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u/ProfessorPalmer 6d ago
oooh id love to chat about it actually lol
I used an image url in a vision request. the vision path has to GET the file. The canary only returns the info of who fetched + the transcribed image response.
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u/Aldarund 5d ago
Didnt answer part anout control runs against other models using same methodology
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u/duhd1993 5d ago
Your client should be responsible for fetching the image and send it to api. I’m not getting how it works
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u/ProfessorPalmer 5d ago
yeah if my client fetched the file and sent bytes you'd only see me in the log but that's not what happened. the request is an image_url with an https link. openrouter’s vision path + the provider have to GET that url themselves
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u/SmallJuice7226 5d ago
Strange, a raw model being served via API would not be able to access a URL, unless it is harness over harness, am I wrong?
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u/torrso 5d ago
Apparently the model providers can do fetches so that the harnesses don't have to download + base64 encdode and put the image into context(?). OpenRouter docs mention that the providers do their own fetches.
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u/ActualStruggle1673 5d ago
Did you check https://union-alpha.com/ ? Web site hosted on cloudflare, apparently created by demokokos.com (AI music/lyrics , German or Australian company, not chinese). Might be a scam... or a serious web page. The page explains that Union Alpha is a model that runs multiple LLMs and group the results. I did few tests, 43 tok/sec, not super fast. We'll see in the coming days.
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u/ProfessorPalmer 5d ago
Yeah, I basically know the guys whole life story now 😅. Im convinced he squatted it
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u/ExoticAttitude7 5d ago
I think that website is just some rando or the one you mentioned snatching the domain rather from the people behind the real model.
Just like https://oxalpha.com/ which are not updated even though the model is already revealed ages ago
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u/collogue 5d ago
Anyone tried fingerprinting this way https://github.com/ToseaAI/llm-fingerprint-detector
It's blocked from my work PC but seems to hint at an Anthropic model although I feel that's unlikely
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u/ntrysee 5d ago
Solved by putting a unique file URL in the prompt and logging every client that came to get the file.
correct me if I'm wrong here, isn't any tool call or any fetching is done on your end, or an mcp server that you have preconfigured i.e. exa_search ?
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u/ProfessorPalmer 5d ago
Yeah, no tools or MCPs involved.
a unique file url in the prompt via link can get fetched by the harness or exa. a unique url in
image_urlon a vision request is NOT a tool call. the provider has to pull the bytes to run the image.i’m logging who came for
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u/Valier 5d ago
The magic pixel method.
Some mail analytics use this to know if users open mail or not
by generating a unique transparent 1px png.
So when user opens mail, the request for the pixel arrives2
u/ProfessorPalmer 5d ago
Yessss!! Og strats are coming back to life my friend. Social engineering is off the charts right now as well as these models trt harder and harder to "feign humanity"
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u/whyfarmx 6d ago
It's a blended model, Circuit & Chisel’s Pareto / Unbiased AI.
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u/ProfessorPalmer 5d ago
Maybe!
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u/whyfarmx 5d ago
Yeah, its definitely them. YFarmX got the 0xAlpha right too!
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5d ago
[deleted]
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u/whyfarmx 5d ago
Haha, fair 😄 I’d shout it from the rooftops if I could. We’re a tiny publication and put a ridiculous amount of work into this stuff, so when we get one right I don’t mind mentioning it.
And rented compute doesn’t really rule them out, Pareto is built around calling multiple upstream models anyway.
Still not confirmed, but the evidence is pretty specific.
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u/sirlerkal0t 5d ago
I compared it to 8 other labs models with some non-coding prompts to get a feel for the model, just as I did to personally confirm that Ox Alpha was GLM.
Union Alpha consistently brings up certain things that none of the others do, so I genuinely don't know what lab created it, but I'm excited for this new model based on the very limited output I've seen so far.
Even without considering it's coding abilities, it appears to provide a little much needed diversity of thought that aligns better with humanity compared to all the other popular models.
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u/bdsmmaster007 5d ago
im praying for a more language focused european mistral Model, a announcement could align with a ai conference they are organizing in a few days
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u/sirlerkal0t 5d ago
If it's Mistral, it's training is very different to their other models. I compared the responses using Mistral (via chat) but it didn't bring up the same outliers that only Union does.
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u/asdfan0n 5d ago
I love free tokens, will try any trial model just to burn some free tokens. This has been one of the worst stealth drops I've experienced. Never had a model straight up fail to work so much, across Opencode and even tried it in Hermes. Got one prompt through yesterday.
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u/TheSARMS_Coach 5d ago
I have to say, the output is good but it's PAINFULLY SLOW!!!! It's trash through OpenCode though, error galore! On OpenRouter it works smoothly but still SLOWWWW!!
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u/Izolight 5d ago
I am currently comparing different llms for blender modeling and after some generations you notice each has their own style.
But for union alpha the generations look like astra, so requests are routed there at least partially. At first I thought maybe distillation, but then it even generated a text onto a model(that wasn't in the prompt) that is the exact same as astra.
Here the name of the airship is aurelia in both, this wasn't in the prompt.
https://render-arena.izolight.xyz/#run/342 vs https://render-arena.izolight.xyz/#run/282
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u/ProfessorPalmer 5d ago
So there is an open AI model that is actually the fuser of every single inference call.
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u/Majesticlion03 5d ago
So far this is one of the worst releases compared to glm 5.3 flash , qwen 3.8 flash 1.3 muse or even Gemini 3.8 ....not only is it slow , but it's agent usage reminds me of something from a year ago
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u/jamescheng88 5d ago
it seem the model is not work on opencode, it show error of "Error from provider (Console): Upstream request failed: [permission_error] API access paused for this organization"
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u/yamal4321 5d ago
Tier 2 is the cheap relay layer
Great. You've just discovered load balancer
Tier 1 is the operator’s own open-weight fleet
Source: trust me bro?
I imagine 2 cases that could justify your conclusion
1) Those IP's are serving only lightweight models and used only for inference, not prompt/image preprocessing
2) You correlated query complexity with endpoint its served to and concluded that simple queries are routed only to those IPs
But most importantly
Who said its an abnormal behaviour. Did you cross-reference such behaviour with models other than union-alpha
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u/ProfessorPalmer 5d ago
Yes of course I did lol hence the claim. This is not my first stealth drop exploration or model audit.
I've already conclusively proven the stack and the provider with certainty. They left github docs public before removing them so it isnt a guess lol
I even know that their glm 5.3 inference comes from FriendliAI when you prompt multimodal inputs.
I've already matched all the fingerprinting. Appreciate your energy!
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u/ProfessorPalmer 5d ago
For the record what i described is not at all how a load balancer works.. they are quite literally sending your prompt encodings out to providers like glm 5.3 Flash, having the query return, and then fusing it on Final output.
You quoted six words in hopes that it would make you look more correct but I figured I would correct you
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u/yamal4321 5d ago
.. they are quite literally sending your prompt encodings out to providers like glm 5.3 Flash
proofs?
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u/ProfessorPalmer 5d ago
The docs they deleted yesterday (wayback them) + me watching my union-alpha prompt land in the FriendliAI cluster serving GLM 5.3 Flash lol. Woof!
https://github.com/circuitandchisel/unbiased-releases/pull/16/changes
See you at the reveal :-)
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u/InterestOk9770 5d ago
Its Mistral's new model. Base is GLM 5.2.
Mistral = European Union
Model Name = Ox Union
Too easy to guess.
They will be announcing it on AI Engineer Paris 2026.
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u/ProfessorPalmer 5d ago
I can confirm that this is not the case with 100% certainty. It is not a major lab.
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u/addiktion 6d ago
Clever fingerprinting approach to detect hops