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AI Models
Guide

A quick-reference to the major AI models, who makes them, and what they do best.

Updated July 19, 2026
Model Company Best For Key Differentiator
GPT-5.x OpenAI General purpose GPT-5.5 API flagship (Apr 24) — $5/1M input, $30/M output; GPT-5.5 Instant (May 5) is the new ChatGPT default for all tiers — leaner variant, ~30% fewer words/lines, optimized for low latency; GPT-5.6 Sol/Terra/Luna launched July 9, 2026 — Sol ($5/$30) flagship/best coding, Terra ($2.50/$15) mid-tier, Luna ($1/$6) lightweight; dynamic routing across sub-models; GPT-Live-1/mini launched July 8, 2026 — full-duplex voice models with agentic delegation to GPT-5.5, now the default ChatGPT voice mode
Claude 4.x Family Anthropic Coding & reasoning Fable 5 (Jun 9) — 1M context, 128K output, $10/$50 per 1M tokens, 95% SWE-bench Verified, 80% SWE-bench Pro; Opus 4.8 (May 28) — 69.2% SWE-bench Pro, Dynamic Workflows for parallel subagents; Sonnet 5 (Jun 30) — new default Free/Pro model, near-Opus 4.8 performance at $2/$10 per 1M (intro); Haiku 4.5 hits ~90% of Sonnet 4.5 coding at a fraction of the price
Gemini 3.x Google DeepMind Multimodal Gemini 3.5 Pro (I/O 2026): has missed three consecutive GA deadlines (most recently July 17); no confirmed launch date, reportedly rebuilt from scratch after recursive tool-calling failures; still limited Vertex enterprise preview; leads 3.1 Pro on reasoning; Gemini 3.5 Flash (May 20) is the new default in the Gemini app at $1.50/$9.00 per M tokens; 3.1 Ultra remains the top reasoning tier
Grok 4.x xAI Real-time info Grok 4.3 (Apr 30) is the cost-efficient API model at $1.25/$2.50 per M tokens with always-on reasoning and native video input (5-min clips); Grok 4 Heavy is the premium multi-agent variant (256K context, first model to hit 50.7% on Humanity's Last Exam (text-only with tools)) gated behind the $300/mo SuperGrok Heavy tier; Grok 4.5 launched July 8, 2026 — 1.5T-param V9 MoE, 500K context, $2/$6 per 1M tokens; EU availability pending mid-July
Llama 4 Meta Open-source 10M token context; fully self-hostable; Behemoth effectively shelved — repeated delays, MoE-routing failures; Meta pivoting to Muse Spark
Muse Spark 1.1 Meta Superintelligence Labs Agentic coding & reasoning Released Apr 8, 2026, upgraded to 1.1 on July 9, 2026 — Meta's first closed-weight frontier model and first paid developer API ($1.25/$4.25 per 1M tokens); 1M token context, agentic coding focus (tool use, computer use, multi-agent orchestration); top scores on MCP Atlas, JobBench, Humanity's Last Exam
DeepSeek V4 DeepSeek Cost efficiency Released April 24, 2026 — V4-Pro (1.6T MoE, $1.74/1M input, $3.48/1M output) and V4-Flash (284B, $0.14/1M input); MIT, 1M context
Mistral 3 Family Mistral EU compliance Large 3, Magistral (reasoning), Devstral (open-source coding agent), Small 4, Voxtral — enterprise-safe with data sovereignty
Qwen 3.7 Alibaba Multilingual Qwen 3.7 Max (May 19, closed-weight) — 56.6 AI Intelligence Index, $2.50/$7.50 per 1M tokens; Qwen 3.7 Plus with vision GA June 1; Qwen3.5 open-weight (397B) and Qwen3.6-Plus still available
Microsoft MAI Microsoft Speech & media AI MAI-Transcribe-1, MAI-Voice-1, MAI-Image-2, plus Phi-4-reasoning (Apr 10) — Microsoft's own foundation stack on Foundry
Amazon Nova 2 Amazon / AWS AWS-native enterprise Released Dec 2025 — Lite (1M context, MCP), Pro (reasoning), Sonic (speech-to-speech), Omni (multimodal); powers Nova Act agent (90%+ task reliability)
MiniMax M3 MiniMax Cost-efficient coding Jun 1, 2026 — 1M context, 59.0% SWE-bench Pro; successor to M2.5/M2.7; $0.15/$1.15 per 1M tokens
Command A Cohere Enterprise RAG Released Apr 7, 2026 — 111B MoE / 11B active; tuned for retrieval-augmented generation; cost-efficient enterprise tier
Gemma 4 Google On-device open-weight 31B ranks #3 on Arena AI (1452 Elo); E2B/E4B optimized for Android; Apache 2.0
Kimi K2.7 Code Moonshot AI Agentic open-source Released Jun 12 — 1T MoE coding-specialist; 30% fewer thinking tokens than K2.6; top open model on SWE-Bench Pro; Modified MIT
GLM-5.2 Zhipu AI Open frontier Released Jun 13, 2026 (Z.ai / Zhipu AI); 1M context window; MIT license; trained on zero NVIDIA GPUs
GPT-5.4-Cyber OpenAI Defensive cybersecurity TAC-gated fine-tune; lowered security refusals; binary reverse engineering; partners: CrowdStrike, Cloudflare, Palo Alto, Cisco
Claude Mythos 5 Anthropic Security research Graduated from Preview to full release June 9, 2026 alongside Fable 5; Project Glasswing expanded to 150+ organizations across 15+ countries for critical-infrastructure cybersecurity; GPQA 0.9; high-cost pricing retained to gate access
Sakana Fugu Ultra Sakana AI Orchestration / routing Released Jun 22, 2026 — meta-model that dynamically routes tasks across frontier models internally; 73.7% SWE-Bench Pro; $5/$30 per 1M tokens standard, $10/$45 above 272K context
Apple FoundationAI Apple On-device + cloud privacy Foundation Models Gen 3 shipped at WWDC 2026 (June 8) — multimodal image input, Python SDK, and AFM Cloud Pro (co-developed with Google); privacy-preserving inference runs locally for sensitive tasks, routes to cloud for heavier workloads
Sonar Perplexity Search & research Search-grounded, citation-first answers at 1,200 tok/s on Cerebras inference
Composer 2.5 Cursor AI-native coding May 18, 2026 — built on Kimi K2.5 with Cursor's post-training; 79.8% SWE-bench Multilingual, 69.3% Terminal-Bench 2.0; matches Opus 4.7 at ~10× cheaper ($0.50/$2.50 per M tokens)
SubQ Subquadratic Architecturally novel First commercial subquadratic LLM (May 5, 2026) — Subquadratic Sparse Attention (SSA) scales ~linearly; 1M token production context (12M in research config); Claude Opus-level coding at ~1/20th the compute cost

GPT-5.x Series

OpenAI · San Francisco

The versatile all-rounder with dynamic internal routing.

  • GPT-5.5 is the current API flagship — live Apr 24, 2026; $5/1M input, $30/1M output; 1M token context; improved coding, computer use, and multi-step research
  • GPT-5.5 Instant (May 5, 2026): the new ChatGPT default for all tiers, replacing GPT-5.3 Instant — distinct from the API flagship; leaner variant tuned for low latency (~30% fewer words/lines per response). This is what most consumer users actually hit
  • Available to Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise via ChatGPT and Codex
  • Uses an internal router to select the right sub-model per request in real time
  • GPT-5.4 Thinking (Mar 5, 2026): reasoning-first variant — strongest at math, spreadsheets, research, and document tasks
  • GPT-5.3-Codex (Feb 5, 2026): dedicated agentic coding variant combining Codex and GPT-5 training stacks
  • Native computer use and tool calling for agentic automation
  • GPT-5.6 Sol / Terra / Luna (publicly launched July 9, 2026): government review delay lifted; previously limited to ~20 approved companies, now broadly available. 1M token context window. Sol (flagship): $5/$30 per 1M tokens — OpenAI's best coding model, adds 'Sol Ultra' multi-agent mode. Terra (balanced): $2.50/$15 per 1M tokens — GPT-5.5-competitive at roughly half the cost. Luna (fast/cheap): $1/$6 per 1M tokens.
  • GPT-Live-1 / GPT-Live-1 mini (July 8, 2026): full-duplex voice models — listen and speak simultaneously, real-time translation, nine remastered voices; agentic delegation routes hard queries to GPT-5.5; GPQA 84.2% at highest reasoning (vs. 45.3% for the prior Advanced Voice Mode); GPT-Live-1 is now the default voice mode for Plus/Pro, mini is the Free default

Claude 4.x Family

Anthropic · San Francisco

The developer favorite for coding, reasoning, and safety.

  • Fable 5 (June 9, 2026): Anthropic's first Mythos-class model broadly available to the public — 1M context, 128K max output, $10/1M input, $50/1M output; 95% SWE-bench Verified, 80% SWE-bench Pro; available on Pro/Max/Team/Enterprise through June 22, then requires usage credits
  • Sonnet 5 (June 30, 2026): most agentic Sonnet yet — now the default model on Free and Pro tiers; near-Opus 4.8 performance; $2/1M input, $10/1M output (intro pricing through Aug 31, 2026); model ID: claude-sonnet-5
  • Opus 4.8 (May 28, 2026): prior flagship — 1M context, $5/1M input, $25/1M output; agentic coding jumped from 64.3% to 69.2% on SWE-bench Pro, ~4× fewer unflagged coding flaws
  • Dynamic Workflows (new in 4.8): run parallel subagents on independent subtasks and stitch results back together
  • Fast mode in 4.8 is ~2.5× faster at ~3× lower cost than standard inference
  • Opus 4.7 (Apr 16, 2026): still available; superseded by 4.8 on coding and agentic benchmarks
  • Sonnet 4.6 (Feb 17, 2026): best speed/cost balance for most production workloads
  • Haiku 4.5: smallest tier — hits ~90% of Sonnet 4.5's agentic coding performance at a fraction of the cost; ideal for high-volume tasks
  • Leads human-preference leaderboards; strong ARC-AGI-2 scores
  • Claude Mythos 5 (released June 9, 2026 alongside Fable 5): cybersecurity research model via Project Glasswing — 150+ organizations across 15+ countries for critical-infrastructure use cases. Same weights as Fable 5 — differs only in that safety classifiers are lifted for Project Glasswing partners. Not a separate model.

Gemini 3.x

Google DeepMind · Mountain View

Multimodal powerhouse with top benchmark breadth.

  • Gemini 3.5 Pro (Google I/O, May 20, 2026): Google's next frontier flagship — has now missed three consecutive GA deadlines (June 30, then July 17); no confirmed launch date, reportedly rebuilt from scratch after recursive tool-calling failures and hallucination rates falling short of GPT-5.6. Still in limited Vertex AI enterprise preview. Leads Gemini 3.1 Pro on reasoning benchmarks; 2M context window; Deep Think reasoning mode
  • Gemini 3.5 Flash (May 20, 2026): unveiled at Google I/O — now the default model in the Gemini app globally; outperforms 3.1 Pro on coding and agentic benchmarks; ~4× faster than competing frontier models; $1.50/1M input, $9.00/1M output (~40% cheaper than 3.1 Pro)
  • Gemini 3.1 Ultra (May 2026): current top reasoning tier — 2M-token context, natively multimodal across text, image, audio, and video
  • Gemini 3.1 Pro (Feb 2026): prior flagship — 94.3% GPQA Diamond, 77.1% ARC-AGI-2, $2/1M input, $12/1M output. Led the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index until 3.5 Pro
  • 1M token context window on Pro; deep Google Workspace integration
  • Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite (Mar 3): $0.25/1M input, 2.5× faster than prior Flash — cost-efficient tier for high-volume workloads
  • Gemini 3.1 Flash Live: audio/voice model with 90+ language support and lower latency (March 26)
  • Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS: native text-to-speech model with audio generation capabilities
  • Gemini Spark (May 19, 2026): Google's 24/7 persistent AI agent built on Gemini 3.5 Flash — always-on assistant layer rolling out across Google products as the default interactive experience
  • Gemini Omni also announced at I/O 2026 alongside 3.5 Flash and 3.5 Pro

Grok 4.x

xAI · Austin

Real-time data meets raw reasoning power.

  • Grok 4.3 (Apr 30, 2026): cost-efficient API flagship — $1.25/1M input, $2.50/1M output; always-on reasoning, native video input up to 5-minute clips, PDF / spreadsheet / deck generation, ~20% cheaper per benchmark run than prior versions
  • Grok 4 Heavy: premium multi-agent variant — 256K context, first model to score 50.7% on Humanity's Last Exam (text-only with tools); gated behind the $300/month SuperGrok Heavy tier. This is the model the 'multi-agent specialists that debate before responding' description actually refers to
  • Grok 4 Heavy also scored 100% on AIME 2025 — widely (and incorrectly) attributed to the base Grok 4.x model
  • Real-time integration with X (Twitter) for current events
  • Grok 4.5 (launched July 8, 2026): public release of the V9 MoE architecture — 1.5T parameters, 500K context window, $2/$6 per 1M tokens (>60% cheaper than Opus 4.8/GPT-5.5); trained on agentic coding data (Cursor sessions); EU availability still pending mid-July
  • Grok Voice: voice interface model released June 4, 2026
  • Grok 5 still slipping — ~6T parameter MoE on xAI's Colossus 2 supercluster; Polymarket gives ~33% probability of a pre-July ship, with a 1.5M-token context window targeted

Sonar (Perplexity)

Perplexity AI · San Francisco

Search-native AI built for grounded, cited answers.

  • Custom Sonar model fine-tuned for search-grounded factuality and citation accuracy (base model has evolved since launch — check Perplexity docs for the current version)
  • Runs at 1,200 tokens/sec on Cerebras inference hardware
  • Model family: Sonar, Sonar Pro, Reasoning Pro, Deep Research
  • Matches GPT-4o on user satisfaction benchmarks

Composer 2.5 (Cursor)

Cursor · San Francisco

Frontier-class coding at one-tenth the price — built on Kimi K2.5 with Cursor's own post-training pipeline.

  • Released May 18, 2026 — built on Kimi K2.5 base with ~85% of compute spent on Cursor's post-training stack
  • 79.8% SWE-bench Multilingual, 63.2% CursorBench v3.1, 69.3% Terminal-Bench 2.0 — matches Claude Opus 4.7 and GPT-5.5 on coding benchmarks
  • Standard tier at $0.50/1M input, $2.50/1M output — roughly 10× cheaper than Opus 4.7
  • Trained with RL to solve complex tasks requiring hundreds of sequential actions
  • Fast variant remains the default; background agents run tasks autonomously while you work

Microsoft MAI

Microsoft · Redmond

Microsoft's own foundation model stack — independent of OpenAI, built for speech, voice, vision, and reasoning.

  • MAI-Transcribe-1: speech-to-text across 25 languages; outperforms Whisper-large-v3 on accuracy
  • MAI-Voice-1: generates 60s of audio in 1s; supports voice cloning
  • MAI-Image-2: high-quality image generation
  • Phi-4-reasoning (Apr 10, 2026): compact reasoning model — strong math/logic performance at small-model cost
  • MAI-Thinking-1 (Jun 2026): 1T total / 35B active MoE reasoning model — flagship of a seven-model MAI launch; competes at frontier reasoning tier
  • All available on Microsoft Foundry — signals Microsoft building foundational AI independent of OpenAI (Apr 2, 2026)

Meta Muse Spark 1.1

Meta Superintelligence Labs · Menlo Park

Meta's first closed-weight frontier model — a deliberate break from the open Llama strategy, now with Meta's first paid developer API.

  • Released April 8, 2026 — led by Alexandr Wang (formerly Scale AI) following Meta's $14.3B investment
  • Multimodal reasoning with thought compression and parallel sub-agent orchestration
  • Scored 52 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index — top 5 globally
  • Muse Spark 1.1 (July 9, 2026): major upgrade — 1M token context, agentic coding focus (tool use, computer use, multi-agent orchestration), and Meta's first-ever paid developer API at $1.25/$4.25 per 1M input/output tokens; claims top scores on MCP Atlas, JobBench, and Humanity's Last Exam
  • Closed weights: a strategic departure from Meta's open-source Llama lineage
  • Positions Meta directly against OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google in the closed-frontier tier

Apple FoundationAI

Apple · Cupertino

Apple's native on-device + cloud model framework — privacy-preserving inference shipping with iOS/macOS developer APIs.

  • Foundation Models Gen 3 shipped at WWDC 2026 (June 8) — Apple's first-party AI platform from the largest consumer hardware company
  • Multimodal image input support added in Gen 3; Python SDK released alongside for developer access
  • AFM Cloud Pro: cloud inference tier co-developed with Google for heavier workloads; privacy-preserving on-device inference for sensitive tasks
  • Ships as native iOS/macOS developer APIs — direct integration into the Apple ecosystem

Amazon Nova 2

Amazon / AWS · Seattle

AWS's enterprise foundation model family — multimodal, agentic, and natively integrated with Bedrock.

  • Released December 2025 at AWS re:Invent — Amazon's flagship in-house model family
  • Nova 2 Lite: 1M-token context with native MCP support — fast and cost-efficient tier
  • Nova 2 Pro: tuned for complex reasoning and agentic workflows
  • Nova 2 Sonic: speech-to-speech model for low-latency voice apps
  • Nova 2 Omni: unified multimodal across text, image, audio, and video
  • Powers Nova Act — agentic browser service claiming 90%+ task reliability — and Nova Forge for custom model training

The biggest story of April 2026: Anthropic and OpenAI each released a cybersecurity-focused model within days of each other — gated, expensive, and limited to enterprise partners. These are not general-purpose models.

GPT-5.4-Cyber

OpenAI · San Francisco

Fine-tuned GPT-5.4 for enterprise defensive cybersecurity — gated behind OpenAI's Trusted Access for Cyber program.

  • Released April 14, 2026 — fine-tune of GPT-5.4 for dual-use security research
  • Lowered refusal thresholds for defensive cybersecurity tasks; native binary reverse engineering without source code
  • Gated behind OpenAI's Trusted Access for Cyber (TAC) program; enterprise partners include CrowdStrike, Cloudflare, Palo Alto Networks, Cisco, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs
  • No public API pricing; $10M in API credits committed via Cybersecurity Grant Program
  • Direct counterpart to Anthropic's Claude Mythos Preview — part of a matched pair of restricted cyber-focused models released within days of each other

Claude Mythos 5

Anthropic · San Francisco

Cybersecurity research model via Project Glasswing — Anthropic's counterpart to GPT-5.4-Cyber. Graduated from Preview to full release June 9, 2026.

  • Originally launched April 6–7, 2026 as Claude Mythos Preview via Project Glasswing; graduated to Claude Mythos 5 on June 9, 2026 alongside Fable 5
  • GPQA 0.9; 93.9% SWE-bench Verified; 97.6% USAMO 2026
  • June 2, 2026: Anthropic expanded access from the initial ~12 partners (AWS, Apple, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Google, JPMorgan, Microsoft, NVIDIA, others) to 150+ organizations across 15+ countries, targeted at critical-infrastructure cybersecurity
  • Same weights as Fable 5 — differs only in that safety classifiers are lifted for Project Glasswing partners. Not a separate model.
  • High-cost pricing retained to gate general use and prevent misuse
  • Cybersecurity-focused capabilities not available in standard Claude models

Models that present as a single API but dynamically route tasks across multiple frontier models internally — no hardcoded rules. A new category as of mid-2026.

Sakana Fugu / Fugu Ultra

Sakana AI · Tokyo, Japan

A meta-model that presents as a single API but dynamically routes tasks across a pool of frontier models internally — no hardcoded rules.

  • Released June 22, 2026 — based on Sakana's ICLR 2026 papers: TRINITY coordinator + Conductor orchestration architecture
  • 73.7% SWE-Bench Pro — above Opus 4.8 (69.2%), below Fable 5 (80.3%)
  • Pricing: $5/$30 per 1M tokens standard; $10/$45 above 272K context
  • Can substitute models around export controls — designed for research, cybersecurity, multi-step patent work
  • Notable: no hardcoded routing rules — the meta-model selects and coordinates sub-models dynamically per task

Llama 4

Meta · Menlo Park

The leading open-source model family.

  • Llama 4 Scout: industry-leading 10M token context window
  • Llama 4 Maverick: 17B active / 128 experts — outperforms GPT-4o and Gemini 2.0 Flash on key benchmarks
  • Fully open weights; can be self-hosted for complete data control
  • Llama 4 Behemoth (288B active): effectively shelved — repeated delays (originally April, then June), MoE-routing and chunked-attention failures at 2T scale; Meta pivoting to closed-weight Muse Spark; no formal cancellation but no release expected near-term
  • Llama 4.5: Meta has separately announced a Llama 4.5 open-weight release for 2026 — the next step in the open Llama line, distinct from the closed-weight Muse Spark family; no release date confirmed as of July 2026

DeepSeek V4

DeepSeek · Hangzhou, China

Cost-redefining open-source frontier — released April 24, 2026 in two variants.

  • V4-Pro: 1.6T total parameters / 49B active MoE; $1.74/1M input, $3.48/1M output — cheapest frontier-class open model
  • V4-Flash: 284B total / 13B active; $0.14/1M input, $0.28/1M output — ultra-budget tier
  • MIT license; native 1M context window; built-in agentic long-context and tool-use
  • Engram conditional memory and Manifold-Constrained Hyper-Connections for improved long-context performance
  • Entire V3/V4 lineage trained for under $6M — redefining AI cost efficiency

Mistral 3 Family

Mistral AI · Paris, France

The enterprise-safe European model family, now spanning text, reasoning, code, and speech.

  • Mistral Large 3: EU AI Act-compliant flagship for regulated industries (finance, healthcare, gov); 675B total MoE
  • Magistral: Mistral's reasoning model — multilingual, transparent chain-of-thought
  • Mistral Small 4 (March 16): 119B/6.5B-active MoE unifying reasoning (Magistral), vision (Pixtral), and coding (Devstral) in one endpoint
  • Devstral 2: 72.2% SWE-bench Verified — top open agentic coding model; 123B params, 256K context; Modified MIT license with a commercial restriction for companies >$20M/month revenue (separate Mistral agreement required)
  • Devstral Small 2: 24B params, true Apache 2.0 license, 68% SWE-bench Verified — the genuinely-open companion to Devstral 2 for local and self-hosted use
  • Voxtral (March 26): open-source 4B text-to-speech, 9 languages, runs on consumer hardware
  • Strong European data sovereignty guarantees across the full model family

MiniMax M3

MiniMax · Shanghai, China

Cost-efficient open-weight coding leader — 1M context and top SWE-bench Pro score per dollar.

  • Released June 1, 2026 — 1M context window; 59.0% SWE-bench Pro; successor to M2.5 (Feb 12) and M2.7 (late April)
  • $0.15/1M input, $1.15/1M output — among the cheapest frontier-class coding models
  • M2.5 base: 230B MoE / 10B active, 80.2% SWE-Bench Verified; M3 extends context and benchmark lead

Kimi K2.7 Code

Moonshot AI · Beijing, China

Open-source coding specialist — 1T MoE with 30% fewer thinking tokens than K2.6.

  • Released June 12, 2026 — 1T parameter MoE, coding-specialized variant of K2.6
  • 30% fewer thinking tokens than K2.6 — faster reasoning at equivalent benchmark quality
  • K2.6 base (Apr 20): Agent Swarm scales to 300 sub-agents; 58.6 SWE-Bench Pro; top open model
  • Open-weight, Modified MIT license; weights on Hugging Face
  • Kimi Code CLI agent rivals Claude Code and Gemini CLI

GLM-5.2

Zhipu AI · Beijing, China

Frontier-class model on a MIT license — now with 1M context.

  • Released June 13, 2026 (Z.ai / Zhipu AI) — 1M context window; successor to GLM-5.1 (Apr 6)
  • GLM-5.1 base: 744B parameter MoE (44B active); GPQA 0.9; 77.8% SWE-bench Verified
  • Released under MIT license; trained entirely on Huawei Ascend chips (zero NVIDIA GPUs)
  • Priced roughly 6x cheaper than comparable proprietary models

NVIDIA Nemotron 3

NVIDIA · Santa Clara

NVIDIA's open agentic reasoning stack — Nano, Super, and Ultra 550B sizes on Bedrock.

  • Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B (June 4, 2026): 550B-parameter open MoE / ~55B active per token; hybrid Mamba-Transformer architecture for sub-quadratic long-context efficiency; 1M context; OpenMDW-1.1 license; 48/100 on Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index — strongest open US model benchmarked
  • Nemotron 3 Nano Omni: 30B MoE omni-modal reasoning model — unifies vision, audio, and text; distinct from the Ultra 550B; available alongside Nano/Super sizes
  • Weights, training data, and recipes all public on Hugging Face
  • Earlier sizes (Nano, Super) released March 2026; available on Amazon Bedrock and NVIDIA NIM
  • Nemotron 3 Super peers with Llama 4 Maverick on open-model benchmarks
  • Optimized for NVIDIA hardware; available for self-hosting via NIM microservices

Gemma 4

Google · Mountain View

Open-weight models from Gemini 3 research — optimized for on-device and frontier-class performance.

  • Four Apache 2.0 models: E2B (2.3B), E4B (4.5B), 26B MoE (4B active), 31B dense (Apr 2, 2026)
  • 31B ranks #3 on Arena AI leaderboard at 1452 Elo — outperforms models 20× its size
  • E2B/E4B optimized for on-device Android: up to 4× faster and 60% less battery than prior Gemma
  • All models natively multimodal; larger variants support 256K context

Cohere Command A

Cohere · Toronto

Enterprise-tuned MoE model optimized for retrieval-augmented generation.

  • Released April 7, 2026 — 111B total parameters / 11B active MoE
  • Purpose-built for RAG: strong grounding, citation accuracy, and document comprehension
  • Cost-efficient enterprise tier; competitive on retrieval benchmarks against larger models
  • Available via Cohere API and on major cloud marketplaces

Qwen 3.7

Alibaba Cloud · Hangzhou, China

The multilingual giant — Qwen 3.7 Max and Plus lead the current lineup; open-weight Qwen3.5 remains available.

  • Qwen 3.7 Max (May 19, 2026): closed-weight flagship — 56.6 on Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index; $2.50/1M input, $7.50/1M output
  • Qwen 3.7 Plus (GA June 1, 2026): closed-weight multimodal with vision, deep reasoning, and tool invocation; built on the Bailian platform
  • Qwen3.5 (Feb 2026): open-weight, 397B parameters — available for self-hosting and fine-tuning
  • Qwen3.5-Omni: native audio/video/text multimodal — Thinker architecture, 256K context, 113-language speech recognition
  • Qwen3.6-Plus (Apr 2, 2026): closed-source API-only, 1M context; still available alongside 3.7 lineup
  • 0.6B to 235B open-weight range; Qwen3-Max (1T+) API-only; supports 119 languages
  • Qwen3-Coder achieves 69.6% on SWE-Bench Verified; Qwen3 Coder Next (May 18, 2026) is the follow-up

SubQ

Subquadratic · San Francisco

The first commercial subquadratic LLM — a clean break from quadratic-attention transformers.

  • Released May 5, 2026 — first production model built on Subquadratic Sparse Attention (SSA), which scales roughly linearly with context length rather than quadratically
  • 1M-token production context window; 12M-token context demonstrated in research configurations
  • Matches Claude Opus-class performance on coding benchmarks at roughly 1/20th the compute cost
  • Architecturally distinct from every other model on this page — the most significant new attention mechanism shipped in 2026
  • Backed by $29M seed round (May 2026); positioning as infrastructure for very-long-context agents

Midjourney v7

Midjourney

Artistic, stylized visuals with strong aesthetic control

Midjourney V1 Video

Midjourney

First video model from MJ — 5s clips extendable to 20s; ~25× cheaper than competitors

Imagen 4

Google

Photorealistic composition, spelling, and typography accuracy

Nano Banana 2

Google

Fast AI image editing, remixing, and style transfers; built on Gemini Flash

DALL-E 4

OpenAI

Integrated with ChatGPT; strong prompt adherence

Stable Diffusion 3.5

Stability AI

Open-source; self-hostable; highly customizable

FLUX.2

Black Forest Labs

From the Stable Diffusion creators; up to 4MP; open-weight Klein variant

LTX-2.3

Lightricks

Open-weights video+audio in one pass; 22B params; 4K at 50 FPS, up to 20s; one of the most capable open video models available

Grok Imagine Video 1.5

xAI

~2× faster video generation than prior version, native audio output (Jun 2026)

Reve 2.0

Reve

Image generation with precise layout control and typography — strong alternative to DALL-E 4 / Imagen 4 for design-heavy use cases (Jun 3, 2026)

Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite Image

Google

Specialized fast image generation — Flash variant tuned for high-volume, low-latency image tasks (Jun 23, 2026)

Video generation leaders: Google Veo 3.1 (native 4K + vertical video), Kling 3.0 (native 4K/60fps), Runway Gen-4.5 (creative/cinematic), Runway Gen-4 Turbo (July 2026 — ~60% faster inference at comparable quality to Gen-4), and Seedance 2.0 (ByteDance — notable for Identity Lock, which maintains consistent faces across multi-scene video). Sora 2 (OpenAI) was deprecated April 26, 2026 with an API sunset on September 24, 2026 — do not build new integrations on it.

Building Software

  • Build a full-stack app from scratch Claude 4.6
  • Debug a complex codebase Claude 4.6
  • Generate unit tests and docs GPT-5.x
  • Rapid UI prototyping GPT-5.x
  • Background agents for parallel development Composer 2.5 (Cursor)
  • Open-source agentic coding Kimi K2.6

Research & Analysis

  • Analyze a long PDF or contract Gemini 3.x
  • Summarize a YouTube video Gemini 3.x
  • Get real-time data on a trending topic Grok 4.x
  • Get sourced answers with citations Sonar (Perplexity)
  • Deep competitive research Claude 4.6

Creative & Visual

  • Create stylized hero images Midjourney v7
  • Generate photorealistic product shots Imagen 4
  • Edit and remix existing images Nano Banana 2
  • Generate a short video from a prompt Veo 3.1

Data & Math

  • Solve complex math problems step-by-step Grok 4.x
  • Write and optimize SQL queries GPT-5.x
  • Transparent chain-of-thought reasoning DeepSeek R1
  • Analyze spreadsheet data Gemini 3.x

Self-Hosting & Privacy

  • Run a model on your own infrastructure Llama 4
  • Fine-tune for a domain-specific task Llama 4
  • Deploy in EU-regulated environments Mistral Large
  • Budget-friendly open-source alternative DeepSeek V4
  • MIT-licensed frontier alternative GLM-5

Writing & Communication

  • Write long-form technical content Claude 4.6
  • Draft emails and business writing GPT-5.x
  • Translate content across 100+ languages Qwen 3.6
  • Summarize meeting transcripts Gemini 3.x

There is no single "best" model in 2026. The landscape has shifted from a winner-take-all race to specialized excellence. Match the model to the task.

Sourced directly from company websites and documentation. Updated weekly.

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