Particle-1 joins the cost-accuracy frontier on a data analytics exam

Particle AI built Particle-1 by fine-tuning DeepSeek V4.1 Flash. Its four-question gain on Plotly's exam came from statistics traps and hidden patterns, but Plotly cautions that a single run makes the size of the gain approximate. Particle-1 used more output tokens than its base model on this exam, despite Particle's reported token savings on coding and data engineering benchmarks.