The Companion Lab ELI5 Encyclopedia
We never dumb down proper engineering terms—instead, we explain how every model checkpoint, memory parameter, and billing rule actually affects your wallet and your companion experience. Click any entry below:
Context Window →
The maximum amount of active text (measured in tokens) an AI model can hold in working memory at one time before older messages drop off.
Image & Video CheckpointsTongyi Z-Image-Turbo (S3-DiT) →
A 6-billion-parameter Single-Stream Diffusion Transformer (S3-DiT) developed by Tongyi-MAI that renders photorealistic images in 8 steps.
Image & Video CheckpointsWAI-Illustrious-SDXL →
The #1 community-trained anime and 2.5D illustration checkpoint on Civitai (1.55M+ downloads), built on the Illustrious-XL architecture.
Writing & Slop BenchmarksEQ-Bench Slop Score →
A quantitative metric created by EQ-Bench that measures how frequently an AI model repeats overused romance clichés, purple prose, and "Not X, but Y" rhetorical tics.
Billing & PrivacyApple IAP Tax →
The 14% to 20% price markup users pay when subscribing to an AI companion inside the iOS App Store or Google Play instead of the official web checkout.
Image & Video CheckpointsSeedream 5.0 Pro & Wan 2.5 →
Commercial frontier image-editing (ByteDance Seedream 5.0 Pro) and image-to-video (Alibaba Wan 2.5 / Kling v2.5) APIs used behind the scenes by top AI companion studios.
Writing & Slop BenchmarksAgentic CoT Drift →
The phenomenon where newer frontier models tuned for coding, tool-use, and reasoning (like DeepSeek V4.1 Flash) burn 70%+ of their tokens thinking like a project manager—making their romantic roleplay stiffer and 5x more expensive.
Billing & PrivacyBilling Descriptor →
The exact company name and text string that appears on your monthly credit card or bank statement after you subscribe to an AI companion app.