Models

Pad offers the frontier models from the major labs side by side, on one plan. The model picker in the chat sets which one answers; you can change it at any point in a conversation.

Choosing a model

Draft with a fast model and reason with a stronger one in the same chat. The picker shows each model's name and lab; the rate card shows what each one costs in credits.

Auto

When your organization has Pad Router on, the picker's first entry is Auto. Under Auto, Pad Router picks the model and the reasoning effort for every turn: a quick follow-up goes to a fast model, routine work to a standard one, and a hard question to a frontier model, at an effort to match. There is no effort control under Auto; the router chooses the effort for you.

Auto has one dial, its optimization mode:

• Cost spends the fewest tokens.
• Balanced balances quality, speed, and cost.
• Intelligence reaches for the most capable models on harder work.

Pick a mode from the Auto entry's submenu. Your last pick is the mode your new chats start on, and new chats start on Auto unless you have starred another model as your default. Your admin chooses which modes are available, and which models Auto may use: see Models.

Every reply Pad Router decided carries an Auto badge at the top showing the mode it was routed under. Your admin chooses whether to name the routed model: by default the badge does not, so answers are judged on their own merit; when the display is on, the badge names the model that answered and its effort in place of the mode. Replies from before you switched a chat to Auto keep their own model badges.

Auto costs whatever the model it picked costs; there is no routing fee.

The context gauge

Every model has a context window. The gauge beside the composer shows how much of it the conversation is using, so you know when to start a new chat. Under Auto the gauge measures against a fixed window sized for routing rather than any one model's, so the router can keep the whole catalog available for most of a chat's life.