Frontier models, research and the labs building them

The Lab

Frontier models, research and the labs building them

A laptop screen showing a command-line terminal window partway through a Linux system update China

Models

Moonshot's Kimi K3.1 Pro ranks third on Vals' coding test

Moonshot AI's Kimi K3.1 Pro scores 63.64% on Vals.ai's Terminal-Bench 4.0, third of 57 models, at $4.57 a test; Kimi K3 scores 17.17% at $12.48. Moonshot charges a third less for standard K3.1 Pro than for K3, and it promises the weights by November 4.

Chandni Melwani

Chandni Melwani

China · Oct 29, 2026

Models

Reflection's Beam is faster than every model on our table

Artificial Analysis measures Reflection's open-weight Beam at a median 327 tokens a second across its hosts, faster than any model on New in AI's comparison table, but LiveBench scores its reasoning 80.2, below all nine models on that table. Nebius, Beam's cheapest OpenRouter host and the slowest of the five Artificial Analysis tested, charges $0.25 per million input tokens and $1.00 per million output.

An Nvidia HGX B200 board with eight GPU heatsinks, labelled 'HGX B200 NVL8', on a display table

Chandni Melwani · US · Oct 23, 2026

Models

Meta releases Muse Spark Open under its own licence

Meta's open-weights Muse Spark Open is free of charge under its Muse Model License, but if a company or any of its affiliates offers AI models to third parties via API or a similar interface, and together they gross over $20m in any consecutive 12 months, the company must notify Meta and sign a separate written agreement before offering the model or a derivative as part of that model-as-a-service business. Meta's own table puts it behind GLM 5.3, Kimi K3 and Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index.

The back panel of an Apple Mac Studio desktop computer on a wooden desk, showing its ports and ventilation grille

Chandni Melwani · Global · Oct 20, 2026

Models

OpenAI put no test behind its AGI-era claim

OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra on September 3, and president Greg Brockman closed the press briefing with “Welcome to the AGI era.” ARC Prize, which built the ARC-AGI-3 benchmark, verified two scores for the model: 62.7% with its own standard harness and 99.9% with a harness that preserves the model’s reasoning state.

Rows of empty wooden school desks beside tall windows, with a blank chalkboard on the right wall

Chandni Melwani · Global · Oct 5, 2026

Models

Z.ai ran its new model unbranded for six days

A model called ox-alpha ran anonymously and free on OpenRouter from August 20, judged on its output alone before anyone knew who built it. Z.ai claimed it as GLM-5.3-Flash on August 26 and published the weights under an MIT licence.

Plain cardboard cartons shrink-wrapped on wooden pallets in warehouse racking

Chandni Melwani · China · Aug 28, 2026

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