Under the US Lead and Copper Rule Revisions, a utility may determine a service line's material with a predictive model instead of inspecting it. New York State publishes, per address, which method was used. Almost no address carries both a model classification and a physical verification, so the check is between populations within a utility rather than paired addresses. We screen all 153 New York localities that classified at least 100 addresses this way. Seventy-five (49%), covering 125,990 addresses or 57% of those screened, record one value. Zero variance alone is not misconduct: 68 of the 75 match their own verification or have too little to test. Seven are contradicted by their own crews, six beyond any sampling explanation. Five are boroughs of New York City, which file as one system; one is East Rochester, 550 km away. New York City is the largest case: a predictive model is the recorded basis for 43,215 addresses, and on all of them the recorded material is "Known Other". The city records "Unknown" on 121,779 addresses, 1,880 already excavated, and lead on 120,692. In the model bucket both counts are zero, and the 95% upper bound on the rate is 0.0085%. Across the rest of New York the same method records lead or the hedge "Unknown but could be lead" on 12.21% of 176,888 addresses, a comparison whose weaknesses we report. The model-cleared population is newer, median year built 1984 against 1930, and construction era accounts for about a third of the gap and not the rest: holding era fixed, records-based classification finds lead at 4.3-31.9%, physical verification at 1.5-14.5%, the model in no era. Six era-aware estimators place the expected lead lines among them at 1,150-1,450. Two findings need no comparison: 7,782 of these addresses are in pre-1940 buildings, and the archived 2025 snapshot shows the public-side determination was copied from a customer-side model output.
No single large language model (LLM) is optimal across all queries and budget constraints, making model routing essential for cost-effective deployment. Existing routers adopt diverse formulations and implementations, making fair comparison and extension difficult. We present a unified formulation of LLM routing as a sequential decision process characterized by five components: context encoders, model encoders, scoring functions, decision rules, and learning signals, covering single-turn, multi-turn, and personalized routing. Based on this formulation, we develop an automated pipeline for constructing routing supervision and evaluating routers jointly on response quality and inference cost. The resulting benchmark, xRouteBench, spans generic LLM, memory-augmented, vision, time-series, and personalized routing tasks. We further introduce LLMRouter, an open-source modular infrastructure with more than 16 representative routers. Our empirical study shows that learned routers outperform the strongest fixed-model baseline by 14.6% relatively, lightweight routers become more competitive under tight cost constraints, and user-conditioned routing consistently improves personalization.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to be transformative for development, but Africa is currently facing a fragmented and challenging "AI divide". This paper provides an empirical analysis of the current state of the AI landscape and how it compares with Africa's technological preparedness for the future. In our analysis, we approach the "AI Divide" from three angles: infrastructure, accessibility, and human capacity. First, we look at the physical constraints that prevent Africa from integrating digitally. We then evaluate the human-centred factors that limit the development of AI technology on the continent. Finally, we examine the human capacity to develop AI systems on the continent and provide three focused case studies. Our investigation shows that the physical infrastructure needed to build an AI economy on the continent is lagging, with only 38% internet penetration, poor broadband coverage and less than 1% of all data centres globally. Other constraints include high data costs relative to income, gender-based digital divides, and the need to build more representative NLP models that can understand Africa's native languages. However, there are positive trends towards the emergence of local initiatives and grassroots movements, such as startups and universities, contributing to AI development on the continent. Based on these findings, we provide concrete recommendations to policymakers to help develop a more comprehensive and equitable AI ecosystem on the African continent.