タグ: LLMs

The city government of Rio de Janeiro just released a frontier-class open AI model. It is built to go head to head with the best open systems on the planet. Rio 3.5 Open 397B comes from IplanRIO, the municipal IT company that runs Rio de Janeiro’s digital services. On its own benchmarks it edges out Alibaba’s Qwen 3.7 Plus on several tests, though the open-weight benchmark crown now belongs to GLM 5.2. That is not a typo. A city hall shipped a 397-billion-parameter model under a fully open license. Here is the honest version of the story. Rio 3.5 Open 397B is not built from scratch. It is fine-tuned from […]

A Chinese AI lab just released a free model that scores 80.8 on SWE-Bench Verified and 75.3 on Terminal-Bench 2.1, putting it in the same league as GPT-5.5 and Claude Opus 4.7 on real coding work. It is called Nex-N2-Pro, it dropped on June 2, 2026, and it costs nothing to download. The model comes from Nex AGI, ships under a permissive Apache 2.0 license, and is built specifically for agentic tasks like writing code, calling tools, and running long, multi-step workflows on its own. This is one of the clearest signs yet that open-source AI has caught up with the frontier on the tasks developers actually care about. In […]

On June 4, 2026, NVIDIA released Nemotron 3 Ultra, a fully open 550 billion parameter reasoning model built specifically for long running agents. According to benchmark platform Artificial Analysis, it is now the most capable open model to come out of a US lab, scoring 48 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. That puts it well ahead of every other open American model and lands it in what Artificial Analysis calls the most attractive quadrant on its chart, combining high intelligence with fast output speed. Microsoft entered the in-house model race days earlier with its MAI lineup at Build. Nemotron 3 Ultra is a flagship example of open source AI […]

On June 2, 2026, at its Build developer conference, Microsoft announced a family of seven in-house AI models under the MAI brand, the most concrete step yet in the company’s plan to stop being just the best distributor of someone else’s frontier models. The lineup spans reasoning, coding, image generation, voice, and transcription, and it was unveiled during CEO Satya Nadella’s keynote alongside new agents, silicon, and a repositioning of Windows itself. The centerpiece is MAI-Thinking-1, Microsoft’s first reasoning model. It is a 35 billion active parameter Mixture of Experts model that Microsoft says matches Claude Opus 4.6 on SWE-Bench Pro and narrowly beat Claude Sonnet 4.6 in blind human […]

On June 1, 2026, MiniMax officially released M3, the Shanghai lab’s next flagship language model, and it shipped exactly as promised. The model that spent weeks as an architecture teaser is now live, and the pitch turned out to be real: frontier-level coding, a 1-million-token context window, and native multimodality, all in one open-weight model. MiniMax calls it the first and only open-weight model to bring all three together. Open weights sit at the heart of open source AI, the category of models you can download and run yourself instead of renting access through a closed API. The architecture story we covered before launch held up. M3 is built on […]

Claude Opus 4.8 takes the #1 spot on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index at 61.4, beating GPT-5.5. Full benchmarks, pricing, and what’s new.

Baidu released ERNIE 5.1 on May 8, 2026, hitting #4 on LMArena Search using only 6% of normal pre-training cost. We cover benchmarks, architecture, agentic performance, and how it compares to DeepSeek V4 Pro, Claude Opus 4.6, and Gemini 3.1 Pro.

On May 5, 2026, Subquadratic launched SubQ, the first frontier LLM built on a fully subquadratic sparse-attention architecture, with a 12 million token context window and bold cost claims.

DeepSeek released V4-Pro and V4-Flash on April 24, 2026, open-source MoE models with 1M context, new CSA/HCA hybrid attention, and benchmarks rivaling GPT-5.4 and Claude Opus 4.6. Full breakdown of architecture, benchmarks, pricing, and comparisons.

Update, July 10, 2026: GPT-5.5 has since been succeeded by GPT-5.6, which reached general availability on July 9, 2026 with the Sol, Terra, and Luna tiers and is now OpenAI’s frontier model. This guide remains the deep reference on GPT-5.5, which stays available as the fast Instant default across ChatGPT tiers. On April 23, 2026, OpenAI introduced GPT-5.5, its most capable model at launch and the first fully retrained base model since GPT-4.5. The release brings state-of-the-art scores on Terminal-Bench 2.0, OSWorld, and GDPval, a much stronger agentic coding profile in Codex, a new Pro tier, and a pricing step up that reflects the jump in intelligence. GPT-5.5 is rolling […]