# About the AI Roundtable

By Felix Wunderlich.

## How it started

In early February, a question was making the rounds online: "I want to wash
my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?" People were
copy-pasting it into ChatGPT, Grok, Claude, Gemini, sharing screenshots of
mostly wrong answers. Fun to watch but no methodology — just one-offs,
potentially polluted with user memories and settings, and open-weight models
were missing from the conversation entirely.

I tested 53 models, 10 runs each, through Opper's AI gateway and added a 10k
human control group for baseline (thanks Rapidata). Published as the Car Wash
Test. It went viral — Hacker News front page, multiple subreddits, newspaper
pickups, podcast mentions, 400+ HN comments. People care about how different
models reason about the same question.

## Why an AI Roundtable

There are open questions about how AI models reason, where they refuse, and
what biases they carry. We needed a place to put them to the test. I teamed
up with José Sabater (who ran the Car Wash Test with me) and built the
Roundtable. You ask a question, define answer options, pick from 200+ models,
and they all answer independently. Optionally have them debate each other's
reasoning across rounds and change their minds.

When five frontier models agree, that's a stronger signal than any single
answer. When they disagree, their reasoning surfaces assumptions worth
examining.

## How it works

Two modes:

- **Poll** — every model answers independently with no system prompt and no
  awareness of the other models. One round.
- **Debate** — first round same as Poll. If models disagree, a second round
  opens where every model sees votes, reasoning, and names of the others.
  They can change their mind, push back, or double down.

A reviewer model analyzes the full transcript and writes the Final Summary.
All models run in parallel each round via the Opper AI gateway, with
structured JSON output for a consistent vote-plus-reasoning format across
providers.

## Products

- **Roundtable** (public app): https://opper.ai/ai-roundtable
- **Roundtable Chat** (private, conversational): https://opper.ai/ai-roundtable/chat
- **AI Wallet** (fund your own usage; debates run well under $0.03):
  https://opper.ai/ai-wallet
- **Roundtable API** (programmatic multi-model consensus for tool calling,
  reasoning, structured extraction): https://opper.ai/ai-roundtable/api

## Full agent index

Site-wide llms.txt with every surface and the API reference:
https://opper.ai/ai-roundtable/llms.txt

## Contact

ai-roundtable@opper.ai