New in RoundTable · Council Report
We put a design question to ten models: what’s the best way to reach a correct answer? They didn’t take a side — they prescribed the right tool for each kind of question. RoundTable already had one. So we built the other.
Asked “council or single model,” the table refused the false choice and split the question instead: convene the council for the decisions that matter, and reach for a grounded fact-checker for the plain facts. RoundTable already had the first. So we built the second.
The motion was deliberately split: council versus single model for (1) single factual questions, and for (2) critical, high-stakes decisions. The format was a blind reveal — every model wrote its opening alone, unable to see the others, and all ten were unveiled at once. Independent minds, no anchoring.
What came back wasn’t a slogan. It was a clean piece of engineering judgement: different questions deserve different machinery. The council mapped the two cases to two architectures — and, satisfyingly, the same answer surfaced from seat after seat without anyone seeing anyone else’s.
Contested, high-stakes, many moving parts — where the cost of a missed assumption is high.
Round-table debateA single checkable answer — a date, a figure, a definition, a current event.
One model + groundingOn the high-stakes case the table was emphatic, and it’s the heart of what RoundTable is built for. A single model is tuned to be agreeable — it tends to converge on a smooth, balanced answer that quietly papers over the tail risks. A council does the opposite: it forces independent critique, makes each seat defend its reasoning against peers, and preserves the dissent instead of averaging it away. That’s how a load-bearing assumption gets caught before it ships.
The verdict put it plainly: for critical decisions, the council’s adversarial scrutiny earns its overhead — stress-testing assumptions, surfacing competing interpretations, and pushing on the evidence rather than nodding at it. This is the part no single model replaces, and the reason a round table beats a lone oracle when the decision is hard.
For a plain factual question, the table’s judgement was just as sharp — and pointed at a different tool. Here the bottleneck isn’t reasoning; it’s grounding. Models share a great deal of training data, so what you actually want for a checkable fact isn’t more opinions drawn from the same memory — it’s an external source. The recommendation: one strong model to answer, paired with a web-grounded fact-checker to verify it. Fast, sourced, and checked rather than merely confident.
The operator gave that partner a precise remit, and it became the feature’s contract: the fact-checker may present information, not opinion, and it may flag inaccurate statements. It grounds and verifies; it never quietly substitutes its own answer. A small, sharp tool for a small, sharp job.
The fact-checked setup was the one piece RoundTable didn’t yet have. Now it does. Check mode sits alongside the council and the image studio — the verdict, made literal.
Single model + fact-checker for checkable facts; council + fact-checker for critical decisions. External grounding handles the facts at lower cost, while the council’s debate earns its keep on the calls that need assumptions stress-tested, not just answers confirmed.
It’s two role slots — an Answerer and a Checker. One model answers directly; a web-grounded checker makes a single pass over that answer, pulls out its factual claims, verifies each against live sources, and labels them:
Only the flagged claims go back to the answerer to correct, against the checker’s sources; anything already supported is left untouched. You get the corrected answer with its full audit trail — every claim, its status, its source — under a header that counts what moved: N verified · M corrected · K uncertain. Three of the council’s own conditions are wired straight in:
The checker labels and flags; it never rewrites the answer. The operator’s constraint, enforced.
The picker marks which seats can actually search and nudges you toward a web-grounded checker — so the verification is externally sourced, the way the council prescribed.
Every claim and every source is on the page, including what came back unverified — you see the working, not just a verdict.
That’s the whole idea. RoundTable now covers both ends of the council’s prescription: convene the full table when the decision is contested and the stakes are real, and switch to Check mode when you just need a fact grounded and checked. The deliberation engine designed the upgrade; we shipped it. Next on the bench is the second half of the verdict — a council with the fact-checker built in, for the hard decisions that also turn on facts.
Convene the council, or check a fact.
Open RoundTable →