How to read a model provider’s documentation in ten minutes
The documents published this month are long, technical and mostly irrelevant to you. Four sections are not. Here is where to look.
Following the 2 August deadline, model providers have published technical documentation for the models underneath the products you use. It is dense and written for regulators. You do not need to read it, but you should know how to find four things in it.
This is the practical companion to the 4 August post, and it applies equally to the trust pages discussed on 4 July.
One: the intended and excluded uses
Usually near the top. It says what the provider designed the model for and, more usefully, what they explicitly say it should not be used for.
If your intended use appears in the excluded list — medical advice, legal determinations, employment decisions are common entries — that is not a legal prohibition, but it is the provider declining responsibility. Worth knowing before you build a process on it.
Two: the known limitations
A section every serious provider includes and nobody reads. It typically names the languages the model is weaker in, the topics where it makes more mistakes, and the failure modes observed in testing.
For a Swiss company this section is worth two minutes on one question: how does it handle German and Italian relative to English? The answer is usually « less well », and the size of the gap should influence what you let it do unreviewed.
Three: the training data summary
New this month. It will not be specific — it describes categories of source, not a list. Read it only to check for anything that surprises you.
Four: the evaluation results
Numbers on benchmark tests. These are the least useful part for a buyer, because none of the benchmarks resemble your work. Skip unless you enjoy them.
What to do with the ten minutes you spent
Write four sentences in your own file: the model, the date you read it, the one limitation relevant to your use, and whether your intended use appears in the excluded list.
That note is the entire compliance value of the document for a company your size. Everything else in those hundred pages is for somebody else.