Morning Edition · Wednesday, September 2, 2026Published at 2:20 AM EDT · New York

Mixedbread Releases a Search-Only Model It Says Matches Frontier Retrieval at a Fraction of the Cost

Toast 1 takes over the whole search loop inside an agent, and the German startup claims up to ten times lower cost and twelve times lower latency than general frontier models.

The German search startup Mixedbread released Toast 1, an agent that takes over the entire retrieval loop. Given a query, it decomposes the request into subqueries, gathers evidence, inspects sources, and hands a curated context back to whi…