How Castform + Neon Beats Frontier Models on Price and Efficiency
Summary
The Neon blog case study shows a 4B open-source Castform model achieving retrieval accuracy comparable to GPT-5.6 Sol at about 1% of the cost, using RL post-training and Neon Lakebase Search. It discusses the evolution of agentic search, the Castform pipeline, and how Neon autoscaling and per-project isolation enable scalable, cost-efficient training and inference.