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On 14 March 2023, three publishers announced a model on the same day: OpenAI presented GPT-4, Anthropic opened Claude and Zhipu published the weights of ChatGLM-6B. ChatGPT, released in November 2022, had started the race a few months earlier. This comparison puts the major releases of ten publishers in one place: what each one changed, and the score the publisher published that day.
Last updated: 18 October 2026. The log at the end of the article says what changed at each pass.
In short
Ten publishers tracked: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta and xAI in the United States, Mistral AI in France, DeepSeek, Alibaba (Qwen), Zhipu (GLM) and Moonshot AI (Kimi) in China.
Each score comes from the page where the publisher announced its model: it is measured by the publisher, under its own conditions, and mostly compares with releases from the same period.
Tests wear out: the best models exceed 90% on MMLU, and harder tests take over.
The gaps are narrowing and prices are falling: the cost of a level equivalent to GPT-3.5 was divided by more than 280 between November 2022 and October 2024, according to Stanford’s AI Index report.
To choose a model, nothing replaces a test on your own tasks.
How to read the announced scores
Definition
Benchmark
A standardised test: the same questions put to each model, with a score at the end.
Publishers do not always cite the same benchmarks, because a test that every model passes no longer says anything. Here are the tests that come up in the tables below.
| Test | What it measures | Reference point |
|---|---|---|
| MMLU (2020) | Multiple-choice questions in 57 subjects, from elementary mathematics to law | Over 90% for the best models, the authors of HLE noted in early 2025 |
| GPQA Diamond (2023) | The 198 best questions from a biology, physics and chemistry test written by specialists, with four choices | On the full test, PhDs in the field score 65%, non-specialists 34% despite more than 30 minutes on the web; chance gives 25% |
| SWE-bench Verified (2024) | Fixing real bugs in public Python projects from their tickets, with tests: 500 problems checked by hand | On the first version (2023), the best model tested solved 1.96% |
| Humanity’s Last Exam (2025) | 2,500 questions from dozens of disciplines, written by specialists, that a quick internet search is not enough to solve | Created because earlier tests no longer separated the best models |
| ARC-AGI-2 (2025) | New logic puzzles, easy for a human and hard for an AI, as the organisers describe them | Each task was solved by at least two people, in two attempts at most |
| AIME | An American mathematics competition, a qualifier for the high school olympiad; each answer is a whole number from 0 to 999 | The problems circulate online once the competition is over: see contamination, below |
Three precautions before comparing two figures
Each publisher measures in-house, in its own way. In December 2023, Google presented Gemini Ultra as the first model to beat human experts on MMLU, with 90.04%. The table in the Gemini technical report shows how: this figure comes from a method that generates 32 lines of reasoning before choosing an answer (CoT@32), while GPT-4’s 86.4% comes from a prompt with five examples (5-shot). With five examples, Gemini Ultra scored 83.7%. Number of attempts, tools allowed, thinking time granted: two scores can only be compared under equal conditions.
A public test ends up leaking. The AIME 2024 problems have been public since the competition, and the MathArena team (ETH Zurich and INSAIT) reports strong signs of contamination on them.
Definition
Contamination
A model may have come across the answers to a test during its training, and remember them rather than work them out.
MathArena’s counter is to evaluate models on a competition’s problems as soon as they are published.
An excellent score does not tell the whole story. MathArena and Stanford’s AI Index 2026 report each show it with a contrast:
What the best models achieve
In 2025, beating the top 1% of human AIME candidates (MathArena)
Winning a gold medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad, for Gemini Deep Think (AI Index)
What still resists
Writing proofs: a score below 25% at the 2025 US olympiad (MathArena, May 2025)
Reading the time on an analogue clock: 50.1% success for the best model (AI Index)
That is why a published score serves to spot candidates, and why you then test a model on your own tasks before putting it into production.
The timeline at a glance
The releases that mattered at the ten publishers, in the order they arrived. The details of each, and the score announced at release, are in the next part, publisher by publisher.
The star ★ marks around ten releases that made their mark: those that opened a path other publishers followed, served as a reference for their competitors or took the lead on release, according to the pages cited in this comparison.
2022 and 2023
| Date | Publisher | Model | The key fact |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nov 2022 | OpenAI | ★ ChatGPT | OpenAI’s conversational assistant opens the race to the general public |
| 6 Feb 2023 | Bard | Google opens its conversational assistant to testers, then to the public in March | |
| 24 Feb 2023 | Meta | LLaMA | Weights published for research, from 7 to 65 billion parameters |
| 14 Mar 2023 | OpenAI | ★ GPT-4 | Text and images as input; 86.4% on MMLU |
| 14 Mar 2023 | Anthropic | Claude | The first public Claude, with Claude Instant |
| 14 Mar 2023 | Zhipu (GLM) | ChatGLM-6B | Zhipu’s first open weights, on the day ChatGLM launched |
| 11 Apr 2023 | Alibaba (Qwen) | Tongyi Qianwen | Alibaba’s first large language model, in beta for businesses |
| 11 Jul 2023 | Anthropic | Claude 2 | 100,000 tokens of context |
| 18 Jul 2023 | Meta | ★ Llama 2 | Open weights, commercial use allowed |
| 3 Aug 2023 | Alibaba (Qwen) | Qwen-7B | Alibaba’s first open weights |
| 27 Sep 2023 | Mistral AI | Mistral 7B | Mistral AI’s first model, with open weights |
| 3 Nov 2023 | xAI | Grok | An assistant that knows the news through X |
| 29 Nov 2023 | DeepSeek | DeepSeek LLM 67B | DeepSeek’s first general-purpose model, with open weights |
| 6 Dec 2023 | Gemini 1.0 | Multimodal from training; 90.0% announced on MMLU | |
| 11 Dec 2023 | Mistral AI | Mixtral 8x7B | An open-weight mixture of experts, compared with GPT-3.5 |
2024
| Date | Publisher | Model | The key fact |
|---|---|---|---|
| 16 Jan 2024 | Zhipu (GLM) | GLM-4 | New generation served through the API, presented as close to GPT-4 |
| 15 Feb 2024 | ★ Gemini 1.5 Pro | One million tokens of context | |
| 21 Feb 2024 | Gemma | Open weights drawn from the Gemini research | |
| 4 Mar 2024 | Anthropic | Claude 3 | Three sizes and vision |
| 17 Mar 2024 | xAI | Grok-1 (open weights) | 314 billion parameters under Apache 2.0 |
| 6 May 2024 | DeepSeek | DeepSeek-V2 | Mixture of experts, training 42.5% cheaper |
| 13 May 2024 | OpenAI | GPT-4o | ”o” for “omni”: the flagship model, faster and cheaper |
| 7 Jun 2024 | Alibaba (Qwen) | Qwen2 | Most sizes move to Apache 2.0 |
| 23 Jul 2024 | Meta | Llama 3.1 | A 405B presented as the first open model at frontier level |
| 13 Aug 2024 | xAI | Grok-2 | Also understands images, after a test under a code name on LMSYS |
| 12 Sep 2024 | OpenAI | ★ o1-preview | A series of models trained to reason through reinforcement |
| 22 Oct 2024 | Anthropic | Claude 3.5 Sonnet (new version) | Computer use in public beta |
| 28 Nov 2024 | Alibaba (Qwen) | QwQ-32B-Preview | Qwen’s first reasoning model, with open weights |
| 26 Dec 2024 | DeepSeek | DeepSeek-V3 | 671 billion parameters, trained in 2.788 million GPU hours |
2025
| Date | Publisher | Model | The key fact |
|---|---|---|---|
| 20 Jan 2025 | DeepSeek | ★ DeepSeek-R1 | Open-weight reasoning under MIT, announced at the level of o1 |
| 20 Jan 2025 | Moonshot AI (Kimi) | Kimi k1.5 | Multimodal reasoning, announced at the level of o1, on the day of DeepSeek-R1 |
| 19 Feb 2025 | xAI | Grok 3 | Reasoning through reinforcement, and a first research agent |
| 24 Feb 2025 | Anthropic | ★ Claude 3.7 Sonnet | A model that answers quickly or thinks for longer, and Claude Code |
| 25 Mar 2025 | Gemini 2.5 Pro | Google’s flagship thinking model | |
| 5 Apr 2025 | Meta | Llama 4 | First mixture-of-experts Llama models, multimodal |
| 16 Apr 2025 | OpenAI | o3 and o4-mini | Visual reasoning; 82.8% on GPQA without tools for o3 |
| 29 Apr 2025 | Alibaba (Qwen) | Qwen3 | Optional thinking, 119 languages and dialects, open weights |
| 22 May 2025 | Anthropic | Claude 4 | Opus 4 and Sonnet 4; Claude Code generally available |
| 10 Jun 2025 | Mistral AI | Magistral | Mistral’s first reasoning model |
| 9 Jul 2025 | xAI | Grok 4 | Native tools; 15.9% on ARC-AGI-2 |
| 11 Jul 2025 | Moonshot AI (Kimi) | Kimi K2 | 1 trillion parameters with open weights, designed for agents |
| 28 Jul 2025 | Zhipu (GLM) | GLM-4.5 | Mixture of experts under MIT licence, designed for agents |
| 5 Aug 2025 | OpenAI | gpt-oss | Open weights under Apache 2.0 |
| 7 Aug 2025 | OpenAI | ★ GPT-5 | A single system: a router chooses between a fast model and a model that thinks |
| 21 Aug 2025 | DeepSeek | DeepSeek-V3.1 | A single model, with or without thinking |
| 6 Nov 2025 | Moonshot AI (Kimi) | Kimi K2 Thinking | 200 to 300 tool calls in a row |
| 18 Nov 2025 | ★ Gemini 3 Pro | First in the LMArena ranking | |
| 2 Dec 2025 | Mistral AI | Mistral 3 | A large model of 675 billion parameters under Apache 2.0 |
2026
| Date | Publisher | Model | The key fact |
|---|---|---|---|
| 27 Jan 2026 | Moonshot AI (Kimi) | Kimi K2.5 | Natively multimodal, up to 100 sub-agents |
| 11 Feb 2026 | Zhipu (GLM) | GLM-5 | 744 billion parameters, “from code to engineering” in the publisher’s own framing |
| 16 Feb 2026 | Alibaba (Qwen) | Qwen3.5 | Natively multimodal, 201 languages and dialects |
| 19 Feb 2026 | Gemini 3.1 Pro | 77.1% on ARC-AGI-2 | |
| 2 Apr 2026 | Gemma 4 | Google’s open weights move to Apache 2.0 | |
| 7 Apr 2026 | Anthropic | ★ Claude Mythos Preview | Not released, entrusted to cybersecurity partners |
| 8 Apr 2026 | Meta | Muse Spark | First model from Meta Superintelligence Labs, closed |
| 24 Apr 2026 | DeepSeek | DeepSeek-V4 | One million tokens of context by default |
| 22 May 2026 | Mistral AI | Mistral Medium 3.5 | Weights published under a modified MIT licence; 77.6% on SWE-bench Verified |
| 9 Jun 2026 | Anthropic | Claude Fable 5 | The Mythos class opened to everyone, with safeguards |
| 16 Jun 2026 | Zhipu (GLM) | GLM-5.2 | One million tokens of context |
| 9 Jul 2026 | OpenAI | GPT-5.6 | Three tiers: Sol, Terra, Luna |
| 16 Jul 2026 | xAI | Grok 4.5 | A model for code, trained with Cursor |
| 16 Jul 2026 | Moonshot AI (Kimi) | Kimi K3 | 2.8 trillion parameters, one million tokens of context |
| 3 Aug 2026 | Alibaba (Qwen) | Qwen3.8-Max | The first Max-class model with open weights |
| 10 Aug 2026 | Meta | Muse Glimmer | 30 billion parameters under Apache 2.0 |
| 14 Aug 2026 | Zhipu (GLM) | GLM-5.3 | All the gains from post-training, under a new licence |
| 3 Sep 2026 | OpenAI | GPT-6 Astra | OpenAI’s first model at the “Critical” level in cybersecurity |
| 10 Sep 2026 | DeepSeek | DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash | The smallest of the new architecture, which understands images |
| 21 Sep 2026 | xAI | Grok 4.7 | A new, larger base model |
| 22 Sep 2026 | Anthropic | Claude Opus 5.5 | The level of Fable 5.1 on most tasks, 40% cheaper than Opus 5 |
| 30 Sep 2026 | Gemini 4 Argon | Up to one million output tokens; first reserved for cybersecurity specialists, opened in the Gemini API on 13 October | |
| 6 Oct 2026 | Mistral AI | Mistral Large 4 | 1 trillion parameters, in preview; weights announced for the end of the month |
| 12 Oct 2026 | Meta | Muse Wonder | A series Meta presents as its most capable, for personal and professional agents |
| 15 Oct 2026 | Meta | Muse Spark Open | The weights of a version of Muse Spark: 816 billion parameters, 42 billion of them active |
Publisher by publisher
For each publisher, a paragraph on how it works (open weights or not, licences, what it emphasises), then its major milestones. The right-hand column gives the score the publisher published at release, with a link to the page that publishes it; when a score was only published later, the date is given.
OpenAI: GPT and o
OpenAI started the race with ChatGPT, in November 2022. From September 2024 to summer 2025, the company ran two ranges side by side: the GPT models, and a series of reasoning models, o1 then o3 and o4-mini, trained with reinforcement learning for complex reasoning tasks. GPT-5 brought them together in August 2025 in a single system: a fast model for most questions, a model that thinks for the hardest ones, and a router that chooses in real time. The same week, OpenAI published open weights, gpt-oss, under Apache 2.0. GPT-5.6 comes in three tiers: Sol, the flagship model; Terra, cheaper; Luna, the fastest and most economical; GPT-6 keeps Sol and Luna, and adds Astra above them.
On safety, GPT-5.4 Thinking is OpenAI’s first general-purpose model treated as having “High” capability in cybersecurity, and GPT-6 Astra the first to reach the “Critical” level of its preparedness framework. From GPT-4 Turbo to o3, the scores come from OpenAI’s public evaluation repository, simple-evals, which has not tracked new models since July 2025; since then, the system cards publish few scores in text, apart from HealthBench. Between two milestones, intermediate versions (GPT-4o mini, o3-mini, GPT-5.1 to 5.5, GPT-6 Sol and Luna, GPT-6.1 Sol); the table keeps only the milestones.
| Model | Release | What changes | Score announced at release |
|---|---|---|---|
| GPT-4 | 14 Mar 2023 | Multimodal: text and images as input | MMLU: 86.4%; HumanEval: 67.0%; simulated bar exam: around the top 10% of candidates (technical report) |
| GPT-4 Turbo | 6 Nov 2023 (preview) | A cheaper and better version of GPT-4, 128,000 tokens of context; final version with vision on 9 April 2024 | No score in the release notes; for the April 2024 version: MMLU: 86.5%; GPQA: 49.1%; HumanEval: 87.6% (OpenAI evaluation repository) |
| GPT-4o | 13 May 2024 | ”o” for “omni”, the flagship model, faster and cheaper | MMLU: 88.7%; GPQA: 53.6%; HumanEval: 90.2% (OpenAI evaluation repository) |
| o1-preview and o1-mini | 12 Sep 2024 | A new series, trained with reinforcement learning for complex reasoning tasks; o1 follows in the API on 17 Dec 2024 | MMLU: 90.8%; GPQA: 73.3%; HumanEval: 92.4% for o1-preview (OpenAI evaluation repository) |
| GPT-4.5 | 27 Feb 2025 | Research preview, OpenAI’s largest chat model | MMLU: 90.8%; GPQA: 69.5%; SimpleQA: 62.5% (OpenAI evaluation repository) |
| GPT-4.1, mini and nano | 14 Apr 2025 | Follows instructions better, better at code, up to one million tokens of context | MMLU: 90.2%; GPQA: 66.3%; HumanEval: 94.5% for GPT-4.1 (OpenAI evaluation repository) |
| o3 and o4-mini | 16 Apr 2025 | Mathematics, science, code, visual reasoning, technical writing | Without tools: MMLU: 92.9%; GPQA: 82.8%; MATH-500: 97.8% for o3; GPQA: 77.6% for o4-mini (OpenAI evaluation repository) |
| gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b | 5 Aug 2025 | Open weights under Apache 2.0; the 120b has 117 billion parameters, 5.1 billion of them active, and fits on a single 80 GB GPU | AIME 2025: 92.5%; GPQA Diamond: 80.1%; SWE-bench Verified: 62.4% at high reasoning (technical report, filed on 8 August) |
| GPT-5 | 7 Aug 2025 | A single system: a fast model, a model that thinks for longer, and a router that chooses in real time | SWE-bench Verified: 74.9%; HealthBench Hard: 46.2% in thinking mode, against 31.6% for o3 (system card) |
| GPT-5.6 | 9 Jul 2026 | Three tiers: Sol, the flagship model; Terra, cheaper; Luna, the fastest and most economical | HealthBench Professional, adjusted for answer length: 60.5 for Sol, 8.7 points more than GPT-5.5 (system card) |
| GPT-6 Astra | 3 Sep 2026 | The most powerful model OpenAI has opened to the general public, and the first at the “Critical” cybersecurity level of its preparedness framework | HealthBench Professional, adjusted: 64.7, 4.2 points more than GPT-5.6 Sol (system card, value corrected by OpenAI on 22 Sep 2026) |
Anthropic: Claude
Anthropic does not publish the weights of its models: Claude is used through its app, through the API and through the major cloud platforms. The company has bet on code and agents: computer use from October 2024, then a model presented as the first hybrid reasoning model on the market, delivered with Claude Code, in February 2025; SWE-bench Verified comes back in almost every announcement. Since 2026, safety has divided the range: above Opus, the Mythos class was first reserved for cybersecurity partners, then opened to everyone under the name Fable, with safeguards that route some questions to a less powerful model. Between two milestones, intermediate versions come out every two or three months (Opus 4.1, Haiku 4.5, Sonnet 4.6, Opus 4.7 and 4.8, Sonnet 5, Sonnet 5.5, Haiku 5.5); the table keeps only the milestones.
| Model | Release | What changes | Score announced at release |
|---|---|---|---|
| Claude and Claude Instant | 14 Mar 2023 | First public Claude, in two versions, one of them faster | No score in the Claude announcement |
| Claude 2 | 11 Jul 2023 | 100,000 tokens of context, progress in code and mathematics | HumanEval: 71.2%, against 56.0%; GSM8k: 88.0% |
| Claude 2.1 | 21 Nov 2023 | 200,000 tokens of context | No standard benchmark in the Claude 2.1 announcement, which announces half as many false statements, based on an internal measure |
| Claude 3 (Haiku, Sonnet, Opus) | 4 Mar 2024 | Three sizes, vision, 200,000 tokens of context; Haiku follows on 13 March | Scores given as an image in the Claude 3 announcement |
| Claude 3.5 Sonnet | 21 Jun 2024 | Beats Claude 3 Opus while running twice as fast | Internal agentic coding evaluation: 64% of problems solved, against 38% for Claude 3 Opus |
| Claude 3.5 Sonnet (new version) and 3.5 Haiku | 22 Oct 2024 | Computer use in public beta: the model uses a computer the way a person does | SWE-bench Verified: 49.0%, against 33.4%; OSWorld, screenshot only: 14.9% |
| Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Claude Code | 24 Feb 2025 | A single model that answers straight away or thinks for longer; Claude Code in preview | SWE-bench Verified: 63.7%, and 70.3% with a custom scaffold, on 489 of the 500 tasks |
| Claude 4 (Opus 4, Sonnet 4) | 22 May 2025 | Two models at once; Claude Code generally available | SWE-bench: 72.5% for Opus 4, 72.7% for Sonnet 4; Terminal-bench: 43.2% for Opus 4 |
| Claude Sonnet 4.5 | 29 Sep 2025 | Leads OSWorld; stays focused for more than 30 hours on a task | SWE-bench Verified: 77.2%, averaged over 10 attempts; OSWorld: 61.4% |
| Claude Opus 4.5 | 24 Nov 2025 | An effort setting: you choose how much the model thinks, and so how much it consumes | Absolute score given as an image; in text, at the medium setting, Sonnet 4.5’s best score on SWE-bench Verified with 76% fewer tokens |
| Claude Opus 4.6 | 5 Feb 2026 | First Opus with one million tokens of context, in beta | Search in a very long text (MRCR v2, one million tokens): 76%, against 18.5% for Sonnet 4.5 |
| Claude Mythos Preview | 7 Apr 2026 | Unreleased model, focused on cybersecurity, entrusted to the partners of Project Glasswing | SWE-bench Verified: 93.9%; GPQA Diamond: 94.6% |
| Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 | 9 Jun 2026 | The Mythos class, above Opus, opened to everyone under the name Fable with safeguards; Mythos 5, the same model with fewer safeguards, for Glasswing partners | Scores given as an image in the announcement; published in September 2026: HLE: 57.8% without tools, 63.8% with |
| Claude Opus 5 | 24 Jul 2026 | Close to Fable 5, for half the price | On ARC-AGI 3, a score three times higher than the next model; published in September 2026: HLE: 56.6% without tools, 63.6% with |
| Claude Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1 | 1 Sep 2026 | The same model at two levels of safeguards: Fable 5.1 open to everyone, Mythos 5.1 with restricted access | HLE: 60.9% without tools, 65.0% with |
| Claude Opus 5.5 | 22 Sep 2026 | First model of the 5.5 family: the level of Fable 5.1 on most tasks, 40% cheaper to run than Opus 5 | HLE with tools: 67.7%; Terminal-Bench 4.0: 66.4% |
Google: Gemini and Gemma
Google runs two families side by side. Gemini is closed, usable through the app and the API; Gemma publishes its weights, drawn from the same research as Gemini, under the Apache 2.0 licence since Gemma 4. The company bet early on multimodality (Gemini 1.0 is trained from the start on several types of data) and on very long contexts (one million tokens with Gemini 1.5). Its models first come out in an experimental version or in preview: Gemini 3.1 Pro still was in October 2026. In 2026, a new Gemini Flash came out almost every month (3.6 in July, 3.7 in August, 3.8 in September); the table keeps only the families.
| Model | Release | What changes | Score announced at release |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bard (LaMDA) | 6 Feb 2023 | Conversational assistant on a lightweight version of LaMDA, opened to the public on 21 March in the United States and the United Kingdom; renamed Gemini in February 2024 | No score in the Bard announcement |
| PaLM 2 | 10 May 2023 | More than 100 languages, progress in logic and mathematics, four sizes | No score in the PaLM 2 announcement |
| Gemini 1.0 (Ultra, Pro, Nano) | 6 Dec 2023 | Multimodal from training, in three sizes, down to the phone with Nano | MMLU: 90.0% for Ultra, with 32 lines of reasoning per question (see the precautions) |
| Gemini 1.5 Pro | 15 Feb 2024 | One million tokens of context, mixture-of-experts architecture | Finds a passage hidden in a very long text 99% of the time |
| Gemma (2B, 7B) | 21 Feb 2024 | Open weights drawn from the Gemini research, commercial use allowed | MMLU: 64.3% for Gemma 7B (model card) |
| Gemini 2.0 Flash | 11 Dec 2024 | Native image and audio output, built-in tools, twice as fast as 1.5 Pro | SWE-bench Verified: 51.8% with code execution tools, presented as a research result |
| Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking | 19 Dec 2024 | Thinking mode: the model breaks the request down into steps before answering | No score in the release notes |
| Gemini 2.5 Pro | 25 Mar 2025 | Flagship thinking model, one million tokens of context | HLE: 18.8% without tools, SWE-bench Verified: 63.8% with a custom agent |
| Gemini 3 Pro | 18 Nov 2025 | New generation, Deep Think mode, first in the LMArena ranking (1501 Elo) | HLE: 37.5% without tools, SWE-bench Verified: 76.2% |
| Gemini 3.1 Pro | 19 Feb 2026 | Stronger reasoning, still in preview in October 2026 | ARC-AGI-2: 77.1%, more than double Gemini 3 Pro |
| Gemma 4 | 2 Apr 2026 | Google’s open weights move to Apache 2.0; four sizes, including a mixture of experts | 3rd open model in the Arena text ranking; GPQA Diamond: 84.3% for the 31B (model card) |
| Gemini 3.5 Flash | 19 May 2026 | A family geared towards action: the Flash beats 3.1 Pro in code and agents; Gemini 3.5 Pro, announced, had not been released in October 2026 | Terminal-Bench 2.1: 76.2% |
| Gemini 4 Argon | 30 Sep 2026 | New frontier model, up to one million output tokens; first reserved for cybersecurity specialists, opened in the Gemini API on 13 October | DeepSWE v1.1: 77.9%; AutomationBench: 51.3%, in first place |
Meta: Llama and Muse
Meta published the weights of the whole Llama line, under in-house licences that changed with each version: research only for the first LLaMA, commercial use from Llama 2, the right to train other models with Llama’s outputs from Llama 3.1. With Llama 3.2, the licence for the models that read images excluded individuals and companies established in the European Union. In 2026, the new models come from Meta Superintelligence Labs, under the name Muse: Muse Spark comes out closed, served in the Meta AI assistant and then through an API, while Muse Glimmer publishes its weights under Apache 2.0. Muse Spark has had three updates (1.1 in July, 1.2 in August with the coding agent Muse Code, 1.3 in September), whose scores are only published as images or in PDF. In October came Muse Wonder, the series Meta presents as its most capable, served through its API and in Muse Code, then Muse Spark Open, which publishes the weights of a version of Muse Spark under an in-house licence with limited commercial terms.
| Model | Release | What changes | Score announced at release |
|---|---|---|---|
| LLaMA | 24 Feb 2023 | From 7 to 65 billion parameters, weights reserved for research | LLaMA-13B beats GPT-3 on most benchmarks, LLaMA-65B rivals Chinchilla-70B and PaLM-540B (technical report) |
| Llama 2 | 18 Jul 2023 | From 7 to 70 billion parameters, commercial use allowed | MMLU: 68.9% for the 70B (model card) |
| Llama 3 | 18 Apr 2024 | 8 and 70 billion parameters, trained on more than 15 trillion tokens | MMLU: 82.0% for the 70B Instruct (model card) |
| Llama 3.1 | 23 Jul 2024 | A 405B presented as the first open model at frontier level; 128,000 tokens of context, eight languages | MMLU: 87.3%; HumanEval: 89.0% for the 405B Instruct (model card) |
| Llama 3.2 | 25 Sep 2024 | First Llama models that see images (11B, 90B), and small 1B and 3B models for the phone | MMMU: 60.3% for the 90B Vision (model card) |
| Llama 3.3 70B | 6 Dec 2024 | A text-only 70B, at the level of the 405B on several tests | GPQA Diamond: 50.5%, against 49.0% for the 405B (model card) |
| Llama 4 Scout and Maverick | 5 Apr 2025 | First mixture-of-experts Llama models, natively multimodal; Scout reads 10 million tokens of context | GPQA Diamond: 69.8%; MMLU Pro: 80.5% for Maverick (model card) |
| Muse Spark | 8 Apr 2026 | First model from Meta Superintelligence Labs, closed: multimodal reasoning, and a mode in which several agents think in parallel (Contemplating) | HLE: 58% in Contemplating mode |
| Muse Glimmer | 10 Aug 2026 | 30 billion parameters under Apache 2.0, for agents that run locally | SWE-bench Verified: 76.0%; AIME 2026: 94.7% (model card) |
| Muse Wonder and Muse Wonder Full | 12 Oct 2026 | A series Meta presents as its most capable, for personal and professional agents: the models keep the context from one conversation to the next, pursue a goal, ask for clarification and check with the user before important actions; Muse Wonder is served through Meta’s API and in Muse Code, Muse Wonder Full to Muse Code subscribers | Scores given as an image in the announcement |
| Muse Spark Open | 15 Oct 2026 | The weights of a version of Muse Spark: 816 billion parameters, 42 billion of them active, one million tokens of context, for code and agents; presented by Meta as the most capable American open-weight model, and able to run on two Mac Studios; under an in-house licence with limited commercial terms | Scores given as an image in the announcement |
xAI: Grok
xAI launched Grok in November 2023 with an argument of its own: real-time knowledge of the world through X. The company published the weights of Grok-1 under Apache 2.0 in March 2024, then those of Grok 2 in August 2025, under an in-house licence that allows commercial use in line with its usage policy, but forbids using it, or its outputs, to train other general-purpose models. Since Grok 3, the reasoning models have been trained with reinforcement learning, at pre-training scale with Grok 4; in 2026, the publisher, which now signs as SpaceXAI, is focusing on code and agents, with Grok 4.5 trained alongside Cursor and its own coding agent, Grok Build, in beta since May. Between two milestones, intermediate versions (Grok 4.1 Fast, Grok 4.20 and its multi-agent variant in March 2026, Grok Build 0.1 in May); the table keeps only the milestones.
| Model | Release | What changes | Score announced at release |
|---|---|---|---|
| Grok | 3 Nov 2023 | Assistant in beta, which knows the news through X, after two months of training | HumanEval: 63.2%; MMLU: 73% for Grok-1 |
| Grok-1 (open weights) | 17 Mar 2024 | 314 billion parameters in a mixture of experts, with 25% of the weights active for each token, under Apache 2.0; a raw base model, not tuned for conversation | No score in the weights announcement |
| Grok-1.5 | 28 Mar 2024 | 128,000 tokens of context, 16 times more than before | MMLU: 81.3%; MATH: 50.6%; HumanEval: 74.1% |
| Grok-2 and Grok-2 mini | 13 Aug 2024 | Understands text and images; an early version tested on the LMSYS leaderboard under a code name; Grok 2 weights published in August 2025, under an in-house licence | GPQA: 56.0%; MMLU: 87.5%; HumanEval: 88.4% |
| Grok 3 and Grok 3 mini | 19 Feb 2025 | Trained on the Colossus supercomputer, with 10 times the compute of the best previous models; reasoning models (Think) trained through reinforcement; DeepSearch, a first research agent | AIME 2025: 93.3% at the highest compute setting; GPQA: 84.6%; LiveCodeBench: 79.4% for Grok 3 (Think) |
| Grok 4 and Grok 4 Heavy | 9 Jul 2025 | Native tools and real-time search; reinforcement at pre-training scale, on 200,000 GPUs; Heavy pursues several hypotheses in parallel; 256,000 tokens of context in the API | ARC-AGI-2: 15.9%, a record for a closed model; HLE, text-only questions: 50.7% for Grok 4 Heavy |
| Grok 4 Fast | 19 Sep 2025 | 2 million tokens of context; reasoning and direct answers in a single model; 40% fewer thinking tokens than Grok 4, with comparable results | GPQA Diamond: 85.7%; AIME 2025 without tools: 92.0%; HLE without tools: 20.0% |
| Grok 4.1 | 17 Nov 2025 | Open to everyone; better in creative, emotional and collaborative exchanges | LMArena ranking (text): 1st with 1,483 Elo points for Grok 4.1 Thinking; preferred 64.78% of the time over the previous model |
| Grok 4.5 | 16 Jul 2026 | The publisher’s most intelligent model, designed for code, agent tasks and knowledge work; trained alongside Cursor; default model of Grok Build | DeepSWE 1.0: 62.0%; Terminal-Bench 2.1: 83.3%; SWE-bench Pro: 64.7% |
| Grok 4.6 | 12 Aug 2026 | Agents that work for a long time, interactive and visual work | Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index: 61, at the level of GPT-5.6 Sol; CursorBench 3.2: 69.9%; DeepSWE 1.1: 65.9% |
| Grok 4.7 | 21 Sep 2026 | A new, larger base model; longer reinforcement learning, geared towards problems that take many hours; entirely new safeguards | CursorBench 4.0: 46.3%; DeepSWE 1.1: 71.0% at high effort; Terminal-Bench 4.0: 37.6% |
Mistral AI
France’s Mistral AI alternates between three regimes. Open weights under Apache 2.0, usable without restriction (Mistral 7B, Mixtral, Mistral 3, Small 4); weights published under a licence that limits use (research only for Large 2, non-production for Codestral, modified MIT for Medium 3.5); and models reserved for its API (the 2024 Large, Medium 3). It emphasises the ratio between performance and cost, and raised €3 billion in September 2026 to bring a “sovereign”, open-weight AI up to the level of the best. The first milestone funded by this round, Mistral Large 4, was trained in its own data centres in Europe; in preview since 6 October 2026, its weights are announced for the end of the month.
| Model | Release | What changes | Score announced at release |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mistral 7B | 27 Sep 2023 | 7 billion parameters, open weights under Apache 2.0 | Better than Llama 2 13B on all benchmarks tested, with no figure in the text |
| Mixtral 8x7B | 11 Dec 2023 | Mixture of experts: 46.7 billion parameters, 12.9 billion of them used per token; Apache 2.0 | MT-Bench: 8.30, presented as comparable to GPT-3.5 |
| Mistral Large and Le Chat | 26 Feb 2024 | Flagship model reserved for the API, and launch of the Le Chat assistant | Second model available through an API, after GPT-4, with no figure in the text |
| Codestral | 29 May 2024 | 22-billion-parameter code model, more than 80 languages, weights published under a non-production licence | No figure in the text of the Codestral announcement |
| Mistral Large 2 | 24 Jul 2024 | 123 billion parameters, weights published under a research licence, 128,000 tokens of context | MMLU: 84.0% for the pre-trained version |
| Pixtral 12B | 17 Sep 2024 | Natively multimodal, images and text, under Apache 2.0 | MMMU: 52.5% |
| Mistral Small 3 | 30 Jan 2025 | 24 billion parameters under Apache 2.0, 150 tokens per second | MMLU: over 81% |
| Mistral Medium 3 | 7 May 2025 | Reserved for the API, sold on the ratio between performance and price | At least 90% of the level of Claude Sonnet 3.7, at a significantly lower cost according to Mistral |
| Magistral | 10 Jun 2025 | Mistral’s first reasoning model; Small under Apache 2.0, Medium closed | AIME 2024: 73.6% for Medium, 90% with a vote over 64 attempts |
| Mistral 3 (Large 3, Ministral 3) | 2 Dec 2025 | A large model under Apache 2.0: 675 billion parameters, 41 billion of them active | 2nd among open non-reasoning models on LMArena, for Large 3 |
| Mistral Small 4 | 16 Mar 2026 | A single model for reasoning, code and instructions; Apache 2.0 | AA LCR: 0.72, with 3.5 to 4 times less text produced than comparable Qwen models |
| Mistral Medium 3.5 | 22 May 2026 | Mistral’s first “merged” flagship model, weights published under a modified MIT licence | SWE-bench Verified: 77.6% |
| Mistral Large 4 | 6 Oct 2026 | Public preview: 1 trillion parameters, 49 billion of them active, natively multimodal; weights announced for the end of the month | DeepSWE v1.1: 61.7%; Terminal-Bench 4: 28.3%; Cybench: 93%, on the preview |
DeepSeek
DeepSeek has published the weights of its general-purpose models since the first, DeepSeek LLM 67B: first under an in-house licence that allows commercial use, then under the MIT licence from R1 onwards (“Distill & commercialize freely!”), and up to V4. The company bets on efficiency: a mixture of experts from V2, which saves 42.5% of the training cost compared with the previous model; V3 trained in 2.788 million H800 GPU hours; sparse attention with V3.2-Exp, together with a cut of more than half in its API prices; then one million tokens of context by default with V4. Between two milestones, dated updates (V3-0324, R1-0528, V3.1-Terminus); the table keeps only the milestones.
| Model | Release | What changes | Score announced at release |
|---|---|---|---|
| DeepSeek LLM 67B | 29 Nov 2023 | First general-purpose model, 67 billion parameters, weights published with commercial use allowed | MMLU: 71.3% for the base version; HumanEval: 73.78% for the Chat version (repository page) |
| DeepSeek-V2 | 6 May 2024 | Move to a mixture of experts: 236 billion parameters, 21 billion of them active; 128,000 tokens of context | MMLU: 78.5% for the base version; HumanEval: 81.1% for the Chat version (model card) |
| DeepSeek-R1-Lite-Preview | 20 Nov 2024 | DeepSeek’s first reasoning model, in preview, with no weights at release | No figure in the announcement, which claims the level of o1-preview on AIME and MATH |
| DeepSeek-V3 | 26 Dec 2024 | Mixture of experts of 671 billion parameters, 37 billion of them active, trained on 14.8 trillion tokens | MMLU: 88.5%; GPQA Diamond: 59.1%; SWE-bench Verified: 42.0% (model card) |
| DeepSeek-R1 | 20 Jan 2025 | Open-weight reasoning under MIT, announced at the level of OpenAI o1 | GPQA Diamond: 71.5%; AIME 2024: 79.8%; SWE-bench Verified: 49.2% (model card) |
| DeepSeek-V3.1 | 21 Aug 2025 | A single model, with or without thinking | GPQA Diamond: 80.1% with thinking; SWE-bench Verified: 66.0% in agent mode, without thinking (model card) |
| DeepSeek-V3.2-Exp | 29 Sep 2025 | Sparse attention (DSA): results roughly equal to those of V3.1-Terminus, API prices cut by more than half | GPQA Diamond: 79.9%; HLE: 19.8%; SWE-bench Verified: 67.8% (model card) |
| DeepSeek-V3.2 and V3.2-Speciale | 1 Dec 2025 | DeepSeek’s first model that thinks while using tools; Speciale, a variant that computes for longer, announces gold medals at the 2025 International Mathematical Olympiad and International Olympiad in Informatics | Scores given as an image in the model card; in text, V3.2 at the level of GPT-5, and Speciale above it |
| DeepSeek-V4 (Pro and Flash) | 24 Apr 2026 | One million tokens of context by default; V4-Pro has 1.6 trillion parameters, 49 billion of them active; final version of V4-Pro on 13 August | GPQA Diamond: 90.1%; HLE: 37.7%; SWE-bench Verified: 80.6% for V4-Pro at the maximum setting (model card) |
| DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash | 10 Sep 2026 | The smallest model of the new architecture, which understands images: 552 billion parameters; dated update on 17 October, weights published, faster and with shorter answers according to DeepSeek | GPQA Diamond: 90.9%; Terminal-Bench 2.1: 90.6% (model card) |
Alibaba: Qwen
Alibaba publishes most of its Qwen models with open weights: first under its own licence, then mostly under Apache 2.0 from Qwen2 onwards. Its “Max” models long remained reserved for the API, until Qwen3.8, whose flagship model published its weights under an in-house licence that allows commercial use under conditions. The company emphasises multilingualism (201 languages and dialects with Qwen3.5, against 119 for Qwen3), native multimodality since Qwen3.5, and agents in 2026. Between two milestones, other releases slot in (Qwen1.5, Qwen3-Coder, Qwen3.6, Qwen3.7-Plus); the table keeps only the milestones. At the end of September 2026, Qwen 4 was being trained.
| Model | Release | What changes | Score announced at release |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tongyi Qianwen | 11 Apr 2023 | Alibaba’s first large language model, first in beta for businesses in China; opened to the public with version 2.0, on 31 October 2023 | No score in the Tongyi Qianwen announcement |
| Qwen-7B | 3 Aug 2023 | Alibaba’s first open weights, under its Tongyi Qianwen licence | MMLU: 56.7% (model card, original version) |
| Qwen-72B | 30 Nov 2023 | 72 billion parameters, 3 trillion tokens, 32,000 tokens of context | MMLU: 77.4%; GSM8K: 78.9% (repository page) |
| Qwen2 | 7 Jun 2024 | Most sizes move to Apache 2.0; up to 128,000 tokens of context | MMLU: 84.2% for the 72B; HumanEval: 86.0% for the 72B Instruct |
| Qwen2.5 | 19 Sep 2024 | 18 trillion training tokens, stronger code and mathematics | MMLU: 86.1% for the 72B; GPQA: 49.0% for the 72B Instruct |
| QwQ-32B-Preview | 28 Nov 2024 | Qwen’s first reasoning model, with open weights; QwQ-32B follows on 6 March 2025, announced as comparable to DeepSeek-R1 with 32 billion parameters against 671 | GPQA: 65.2%; AIME: 50.0% |
| Qwen2.5-Max | 28 Jan 2025 | Large mixture of experts reserved for the API, trained on more than 20 trillion tokens | Scores given as an image in the announcement, which puts it ahead of DeepSeek V3 on GPQA Diamond and LiveCodeBench |
| Qwen3 | 29 Apr 2025 | Optional thinking, 119 languages and dialects, open weights under Apache 2.0 | Scores given as an image in the Qwen3 announcement |
| Qwen3-Max | 24 Sep 2025 | More than 1 trillion parameters, reserved for the API | SWE-bench Verified: 69.6% |
| Qwen3.5 | 16 Feb 2026 | Natively multimodal: 397 billion parameters, 17 billion of them active; 201 languages and dialects; Apache 2.0 | GPQA: 88.4%; SWE-bench Verified: 76.4% (model card) |
| Qwen3.7-Max | 20 May 2026 | Proprietary model for agents; the announcement cites an optimisation run autonomously for 35 hours, with more than 1,000 tool calls | SWE-bench Verified: 80.4%; GPQA Diamond: 92.4%; HLE: 41.4% |
| Qwen3.8-Max | 3 Aug 2026 | 2.4 trillion parameters, 95 billion of them active; weights published on 12 August, a first for a Max-class model | Scores given as an image in the announcement; when the weights were published: GPQA Diamond: 92.6%; HLE: 43.6% (model card) |
Zhipu: GLM
Zhipu AI, which publishes as Z.ai internationally, has opened its weights since its first chat model: ChatGLM-6B was released as open source on the very day ChatGLM launched, 14 March 2023. First under in-house licences that allowed commercial use after registration, then under the MIT licence, from the GLM-Z1 reasoning model in April 2025 up to GLM-5.2. GLM-5.3 moves to a licence of its own, which requires a security review from the largest operators of hosted models, above $10 billion in revenue over twelve months. The company bets on agents and code: since GLM-5.1, its model cards no longer publish SWE-bench Verified but SWE-bench Pro, Terminal-Bench and agent tests. Between two milestones come vision models (GLM-4.5V, GLM-4.6V), Flash and Turbo variants, and GLM-5.3-Flash, the first natively multimodal model of the GLM-5 series; the table keeps only the milestones.
| Model | Release | What changes | Score announced at release |
|---|---|---|---|
| ChatGLM-6B | 14 Mar 2023 | Zhipu’s first open weights: 6.2 billion parameters, in Chinese and English, published on the day ChatGLM, based on GLM-130B, went online | No score in the announcement; published in June 2023: MMLU: 40.63% (ChatGLM2-6B repository page) |
| ChatGLM2-6B | 25 Jun 2023 | Context raised from 2,000 to 32,000 tokens, faster inference | MMLU: 45.46%; GSM8K: 28.05% (repository page) |
| ChatGLM3-6B | 27 Oct 2023 | Tool calling, code execution and agent tasks built into the model; 32,000 and 128,000 token variants | MMLU: 61.4%; GSM8K: 72.3% for the base version (repository page) |
| GLM-4 | 16 Jan 2024 | New generation served through the API, presented by the publisher as close to GPT-4, with autonomous tools (All Tools); an open 9-billion-parameter version follows on 5 June | The original announcement is no longer online; published in June 2024: MMLU: 81.5%; GPQA: 35.7%; HumanEval: 72.0% (technical report) |
| GLM-Z1 and GLM-4-0414 | 14 Apr 2025 | Open-weight reasoning models, with 32 and 9 billion parameters, under the MIT licence | Scores given as an image in the model card |
| GLM-4.5 and GLM-4.5-Air | 28 Jul 2025 | Mixture of experts of 355 billion parameters, 32 billion of them active; optional thinking; designed for agents | 3rd of all the models compared, closed and open, with an average of 63.2 over 12 benchmarks (model card); published in August 2025: SWE-bench Verified: 64.2% (technical report) |
| GLM-4.6 | 30 Sep 2025 | Context raised from 128,000 to 200,000 tokens, stronger code | Scores given as an image in the model card; published in December 2025: SWE-bench Verified: 68.0% (GLM-4.7 model card) |
| GLM-4.7 | 22 Dec 2025 | Clearly better at multilingual coding agents and terminal tasks | SWE-bench Verified: 73.8%; HLE: 24.8% without tools, 42.8% with (model card) |
| GLM-5 | 11 Feb 2026 | 744 billion parameters, 40 billion of them active, with DeepSeek’s sparse attention; presented as the move from code to engineering | SWE-bench Verified: 77.8%; HLE: 30.5% without tools, 50.4% with (model card) |
| GLM-5.1 | 7 Apr 2026 | Long tasks: up to 8 hours of autonomous work, from planning to delivery | SWE-bench Pro: 58.4%; HLE: 31.0% without tools, 52.3% with (model card) |
| GLM-5.2 | 16 Jun 2026 | One million tokens of context, long tasks | SWE-bench Pro: 62.1%; GPQA Diamond: 91.2% (model card) |
| GLM-5.3 | 14 Aug 2026 | Same base model as GLM-5.2, all the gains come from post-training: code, long tasks, cybersecurity; weights published two weeks later | Terminal-Bench 2.1: 88.2%; HLE with tools: 62.5% (model card) |
Moonshot AI: Kimi
Since Kimi K2, in July 2025, Moonshot AI has published the weights of its flagship models, after smaller open models (Moonlight, Kimi-VL). The licence is a modified MIT, with a single condition: display “Kimi K2” in the interface of a product that exceeds 100 million monthly active users or $20 million in monthly revenue. Kimi K3 moves to a licence of its own, which also requires a separate agreement from operators of hosted models above $20 million in revenue over twelve months. The company bets on agents: K2 Thinking chains 200 to 300 tool calls in a row, K2.5 directs up to 100 sub-agents in parallel; context goes from 128,000 to 256,000 tokens with the September 2025 update, then to one million with K3. Between two milestones, dated updates (K2-Instruct-0905) and specialised models (Kimi-Dev, Kimi-Linear); the table keeps only the milestones.
| Model | Release | What changes | Score announced at release |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kimi k1.5 | 20 Jan 2025 | Multimodal reasoning trained with reinforcement learning, announced at the level of OpenAI o1 | AIME: 77.5; MATH 500: 96.2; MathVista: 74.9 in long reasoning (technical report) |
| Kimi K2 | 11 Jul 2025 | Mixture of experts of 1 trillion parameters, 32 billion of them active, designed for agents; weights published | SWE-bench Verified: 65.8%; GPQA Diamond: 75.1%; MMLU: 89.5% |
| Kimi K2 Thinking | 6 Nov 2025 | A model that thinks while using tools, 200 to 300 calls in a row | HLE with tools: 44.9%; SWE-bench Verified: 71.3% |
| Kimi K2.5 | 27 Jan 2026 | Natively multimodal, text and images; a swarm of up to 100 sub-agents | HLE: 30.1% without tools, 50.2% with; SWE-bench Verified: 76.8% (model card) |
| Kimi K2.6 | 20 Apr 2026 | Long-running code, design through code, agent swarms | SWE-bench Verified: 80.2%; GPQA Diamond: 90.5% (model card) |
| Kimi K3 | 16 Jul 2026 | 2.8 trillion parameters, one million tokens of context, native vision; weights published later, under a licence of its own | Terminal-Bench 2.1: 88.3%; GPQA Diamond: 93.5% (model card); HLE: 43.5% without tools, 56.0% with (repository page) |
What four years of releases have changed
Prices have collapsed. Stanford’s AI Index 2025 report measured the fall at equal performance. A task that was not cost-effective two years ago can be today, provided you choose the right model for each task.
Open models have caught up. The same report measures the gap between open-weight and closed models. A model you can run on your own server is no longer a second-rate choice.
cheaper in October 2024 than in November 2022, to run a system at the level of GPT-3.5
gap only between open and closed models on some benchmarks, against 8% a year earlier
China is at the same level. According to the AI Index 2026, American and Chinese models have traded the lead several times since early 2025: DeepSeek-R1 briefly matched the best American model in February 2025, and in March 2026 Anthropic’s best model led by only 2.7%.
Models have learned to think before answering. In September 2024, OpenAI presented o1-preview, trained with reinforcement learning for complex reasoning tasks. The others followed within a few months: QwQ-32B-Preview at Alibaba at the end of November, with open weights, then on the same day, 20 January 2025, DeepSeek-R1, with open weights under the MIT licence, and Kimi k1.5 at Moonshot AI, both announced at the level of o1. The idea then merged into general-purpose models: Claude 3.7 Sonnet, Qwen3 and DeepSeek-V3.1 answer straight away or think for longer, as you choose. Today, the thinking effort, and so the bill, is often set task by task.
Code and agents made the biggest leap. In 2023, the best model tested fixed 1.96% of SWE-bench bugs. The AI Index 2026 records what followed on two tests: the Verified version of SWE-bench, and OSWorld, which has agents carry out real tasks on a computer, under several operating systems.
Success rate, before and after the leap
SWE-bench Verified, in one year
OSWorld
Agents still fail roughly one time in three on these structured tests.
Industry has taken over. Again according to the AI Index 2026, more than 90% of the notable frontier models of 2025 came from industry, not from public research.
Which model should you choose, then?
No table names the best model for you, because it does not exist in the abstract. An expensive frontier model is justified for writing a sales page or running a complex agent; for sorting thousands of messages, a small model, far cheaper, is enough, and it answers faster. Choosing the model is in fact only the third of the five questions in our guide to integrating AI in your business: the target task and where the data goes are decided first.
To get a first idea, Arena (formerly Chatbot Arena, created by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley) ranks models based on public votes: two anonymous models answer the same question, the person chooses the better answer, and the names are only revealed after the vote. It is a measure of preference, useful, but it knows neither your documents nor your constraints.
Three questions do the rest:
- The task. One model per use, tried on about twenty of your real examples: that is the method in our article on evaluating a model before production.
- Volume and price. What a task repeated ten thousand times a month costs, and the discounts available: see how an AI bill is calculated.
- Where your data goes. A publisher’s API, a European host or an open model on your server: the four levels of private AI help you decide.
Key takeaway
The names change every three months, the method stays
Spot the candidates from the published scores, try them on your own examples, then choose one model per task rather than one model for everything.
If you have to make this choice, or bring down an AI bill that keeps climbing, that is what our AI at the right cost offer is for: a test bench on your tasks, then a dated routing table that you keep.
How we keep this comparison up to date
Monitoring is automatic, publishing goes through a person:
How an update moves through
- Monitoring
Every morning, the routine that prepares the drafts for this blog rereads about ten official publisher pages (blog, release notes, model card).
- The update
A major release, meaning a new flagship model or a new family, adds a row to the timeline and to its publisher’s table, with the published score and the link to the page that publishes it.
- The review
A person reviews the update before it goes online.
- The record
Each update is noted in the log below.
This tracking feeds our own way of working. The table that assigns a model to each task in our automations is dated and revalidated every quarter: we rerun the test bench on the current tasks, note the suppliers’ prices and new releases, then update the table.
From the field
On the translation pipeline of Palmora Property, a property listings site in six languages that we operate, moving from DeepL to Gemini divided the cost by 60, and 95% of segments come out of the cache without calling the AI again. For sensitive data, an open model runs on our own server, with Ollama: nothing leaves.
Update log
- 18 October 2026: on 17 October, DeepSeek published a dated update of DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash, with its weights; it is in line with the model. No new milestone at OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral AI, xAI, Alibaba and Moonshot AI; Meta and Zhipu were not reread that day.
- 16 October 2026: added Muse Wonder, announced on 12 October, and Muse Spark Open, published on 15 October, at Meta; Gemini 4 Argon has been open in the Gemini API since 13 October. No new milestone at OpenAI, Anthropic, Zhipu, DeepSeek, Alibaba and Moonshot AI; Mistral AI and xAI were not reread that day.
- 8 October 2026: Claude Haiku 5.5, released on 7 October, joins Anthropic’s intermediate versions; no new milestone at the eight other publishers reread that day.
- 7 October 2026: added Mistral Large 4, in public preview since 6 October.
- 5 October 2026: first version. Ten publishers, releases from November 2022 to the end of September 2026.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best AI today?
There is not just one. The best models are close together on public tests: in March 2026, according to Stanford’s AI Index, Anthropic’s best model was only 2.7% ahead of the best Chinese model. The right choice depends on the task, the volume, the price and where your data can go. A trial on your own examples settles it better than a ranking.
Are the scores published by publishers reliable?
They are accurate under the conditions the publisher chose, which are not always those of its competitor: number of attempts, tools allowed, version of the test. Above all, they show that a model is progressing compared with the previous one from the same company. To compare two publishers, look at independent evaluations, and above all test on your own tasks.
What is an open-weight model?
It is a model whose parameters its publisher releases: you can download it and run it on your server, without sending your data elsewhere. Meta, Mistral AI, DeepSeek, Alibaba, Zhipu and Moonshot AI publish them, as does Google with Gemma, OpenAI with gpt-oss and xAI with Grok-1 and Grok 2; Anthropic does not. The licence varies by model and can set conditions, up to a separate agreement above a certain revenue (GLM-5.3, Kimi K3): read it before building on it.
Are Chinese models up to standard?
On public tests, yes, more or less: according to the AI Index 2026, DeepSeek-R1 briefly matched the best American model in February 2025. Several publish their weights, which lets you run them in-house. For personal data, we never use the API of a provider outside the European Union without a contractual framework; an open model on your server settles the question.
How often is this comparison updated?
Every morning, about ten official publisher pages are reread. A major release goes into the tables after review, with its date, what it changes and the score published by the publisher, with a link. The log at the end of the article keeps track of each update, and the date of the last update appears at the top.
Sources
- GPT-4 (new tab)community.openai.com
- Claude (new tab)anthropic.com
- ChatGLM-6B (new tab)arxiv.org
- In November 2022 (new tab)edunewsletter.openai.com
- MMLU (new tab)arxiv.org
- GPQA Diamond (new tab)arxiv.org
- SWE-bench Verified (new tab)swebench.com
- The first version (new tab)arxiv.org
- Humanity’s Last Exam (new tab)arxiv.org
- ARC-AGI-2 (new tab)arcprize.org
- Gemini technical report (new tab)arxiv.org
- MathArena (new tab)arxiv.org
- AI Index 2026 report (new tab)hai.stanford.edu
- MathArena (new tab)arxiv.org
- Trained with reinforcement learning (new tab)developers.openai.com
- A single system (new tab)deploymentsafety.openai.com
- Treated as having “High” capability in cybersecurity (new tab)deploymentsafety.openai.com
- The first to reach the “Critical” level (new tab)deploymentsafety.openai.com
- Simple-evals (new tab)github.com
- MMLU: 86.4%; HumanEval: 67.0%; simulated bar exam: around the top 10% of candidates (new tab)arxiv.org
- MMLU: 86.5%; GPQA: 49.1%; HumanEval: 87.6% (new tab)github.com
- MMLU: 88.7%; GPQA: 53.6%; HumanEval: 90.2% (new tab)github.com
- MMLU: 90.8%; GPQA: 73.3%; HumanEval: 92.4% (new tab)github.com
- MMLU: 90.8%; GPQA: 69.5%; SimpleQA: 62.5% (new tab)github.com
- MMLU: 90.2%; GPQA: 66.3%; HumanEval: 94.5% (new tab)github.com
- MMLU: 92.9%; GPQA: 82.8%; MATH-500: 97.8% for o3; GPQA: 77.6% for o4-mini (new tab)github.com
- AIME 2025: 92.5%; GPQA Diamond: 80.1%; SWE-bench Verified: 62.4% (new tab)arxiv.org
- HealthBench Professional, adjusted for answer length: 60.5 for Sol, 8.7 points more than GPT-5.5 (new tab)deploymentsafety.openai.com
- HumanEval: 71.2%, against 56.0%; GSM8k: 88.0% (new tab)anthropic.com
- The Claude 2.1 announcement (new tab)anthropic.com
- The Claude 3 announcement (new tab)anthropic.com
- Internal agentic coding evaluation: 64% of problems solved, against 38% for Claude 3 Opus (new tab)anthropic.com
- SWE-bench Verified: 49.0%, against 33.4%; OSWorld, screenshot only: 14.9% (new tab)anthropic.com
- SWE-bench Verified: 63.7%, and 70.3% with a custom scaffold (new tab)anthropic.com
- SWE-bench: 72.5% for Opus 4, 72.7% for Sonnet 4; Terminal-bench: 43.2% for Opus 4 (new tab)anthropic.com
- SWE-bench Verified: 77.2%, averaged over 10 attempts; OSWorld: 61.4% (new tab)anthropic.com
- At the medium setting, Sonnet 4.5’s best score on SWE-bench Verified with 76% fewer tokens (new tab)anthropic.com
- Search in a very long text (MRCR v2, one million tokens): 76%, against 18.5% for Sonnet 4.5 (new tab)anthropic.com
- SWE-bench Verified: 93.9%; GPQA Diamond: 94.6% (new tab)anthropic.com
- The announcement (new tab)anthropic.com
- HLE: 57.8% without tools, 63.8% with (new tab)anthropic.com
- On ARC-AGI 3, a score three times higher than the next model (new tab)anthropic.com
- HLE with tools: 67.7%; Terminal-Bench 4.0: 66.4% (new tab)anthropic.com
- The Bard announcement (new tab)blog.google
- The PaLM 2 announcement (new tab)blog.google
- MMLU: 90.0% (new tab)blog.google
- Finds a passage hidden in a very long text 99% of the time (new tab)blog.google
- MMLU: 64.3% for Gemma 7B (new tab)huggingface.co
- SWE-bench Verified: 51.8% (new tab)developers.googleblog.com
- The release notes (new tab)ai.google.dev
- HLE: 18.8% without tools, SWE-bench Verified: 63.8% with a custom agent (new tab)blog.google
- HLE: 37.5% without tools, SWE-bench Verified: 76.2% (new tab)blog.google
- ARC-AGI-2: 77.1% (new tab)blog.google
- 3rd open model in the Arena text ranking (new tab)blog.google
- GPQA Diamond: 84.3% for the 31B (new tab)huggingface.co
- Terminal-Bench 2.1: 76.2% (new tab)blog.google
- DeepSWE v1.1: 77.9%; AutomationBench: 51.3%, in first place (new tab)blog.google
- LLaMA-13B beats GPT-3 on most benchmarks, LLaMA-65B rivals Chinchilla-70B and PaLM-540B (new tab)arxiv.org
- MMLU: 68.9% for the 70B (new tab)huggingface.co
- MMLU: 82.0% for the 70B Instruct (new tab)huggingface.co
- MMLU: 87.3%; HumanEval: 89.0% for the 405B Instruct (new tab)huggingface.co
- MMMU: 60.3% for the 90B Vision (new tab)huggingface.co
- GPQA Diamond: 50.5%, against 49.0% for the 405B (new tab)huggingface.co
- GPQA Diamond: 69.8%; MMLU Pro: 80.5% for Maverick (new tab)huggingface.co
- HLE: 58% in Contemplating mode (new tab)ai.meta.com
- SWE-bench Verified: 76.0%; AIME 2026: 94.7% (new tab)huggingface.co
- The announcement (new tab)research.meta.ai
- The announcement (new tab)research.meta.ai
- Real-time knowledge of the world through X (new tab)x.ai
- An in-house licence (new tab)huggingface.co
- The weights announcement (new tab)x.ai
- MMLU: 81.3%; MATH: 50.6%; HumanEval: 74.1% (new tab)x.ai
- GPQA: 56.0%; MMLU: 87.5%; HumanEval: 88.4% (new tab)x.ai
- AIME 2025: 93.3% at the highest compute setting; GPQA: 84.6%; LiveCodeBench: 79.4% (new tab)x.ai
- ARC-AGI-2: 15.9%, a record for a closed model; HLE, text-only questions: 50.7% for Grok 4 Heavy (new tab)x.ai
- GPQA Diamond: 85.7%; AIME 2025 without tools: 92.0%; HLE without tools: 20.0% (new tab)x.ai
- LMArena ranking (text): 1st with 1,483 Elo points for Grok 4.1 Thinking; preferred 64.78% of the time over the previous model (new tab)x.ai
- DeepSWE 1.0: 62.0%; Terminal-Bench 2.1: 83.3%; SWE-bench Pro: 64.7% (new tab)x.ai
- Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index: 61, at the level of GPT-5.6 Sol; CursorBench 3.2: 69.9%; DeepSWE 1.1: 65.9% (new tab)x.ai
- CursorBench 4.0: 46.3%; DeepSWE 1.1: 71.0% at high effort; Terminal-Bench 4.0: 37.6% (new tab)x.ai
- Raised €3 billion in September 2026 (new tab)mistral.ai
- Mistral Large 4 (new tab)mistral.ai
- Better than Llama 2 13B on all benchmarks tested (new tab)mistral.ai
- MT-Bench: 8.30 (new tab)mistral.ai
- Second model available through an API, after GPT-4 (new tab)mistral.ai
- The Codestral announcement (new tab)mistral.ai
- MMLU: 84.0% (new tab)mistral.ai
- MMMU: 52.5% (new tab)mistral.ai
- MMLU: over 81% (new tab)mistral.ai
- At least 90% of the level of Claude Sonnet 3.7 (new tab)mistral.ai
- AIME 2024: 73.6% for Medium (new tab)mistral.ai
- 2nd among open non-reasoning models on LMArena (new tab)mistral.ai
- AA LCR: 0.72 (new tab)mistral.ai
- SWE-bench Verified: 77.6% (new tab)mistral.ai
- “Distill & commercialize freely!” (new tab)api-docs.deepseek.com
- Saves 42.5% of the training cost (new tab)arxiv.org
- 2.788 million H800 GPU hours (new tab)huggingface.co
- One million tokens of context by default (new tab)api-docs.deepseek.com
- MMLU: 71.3% for the base version; HumanEval: 73.78% for the Chat version (new tab)github.com
- MMLU: 78.5% for the base version; HumanEval: 81.1% for the Chat version (new tab)huggingface.co
- The announcement (new tab)api-docs.deepseek.com
- GPQA Diamond: 71.5%; AIME 2024: 79.8%; SWE-bench Verified: 49.2% (new tab)huggingface.co
- GPQA Diamond: 80.1% with thinking; SWE-bench Verified: 66.0% in agent mode, without thinking (new tab)huggingface.co
- GPQA Diamond: 79.9%; HLE: 19.8%; SWE-bench Verified: 67.8% (new tab)huggingface.co
- The model card (new tab)huggingface.co
- GPQA Diamond: 90.1%; HLE: 37.7%; SWE-bench Verified: 80.6% (new tab)huggingface.co
- Dated update on 17 October (new tab)api-docs.deepseek.com
- GPQA Diamond: 90.9%; Terminal-Bench 2.1: 90.6% (new tab)huggingface.co
- 201 languages and dialects with Qwen3.5 (new tab)alibabagroup.com
- Qwen 4 was being trained (new tab)alibabacloud.com
- The Tongyi Qianwen announcement (new tab)alibabagroup.com
- MMLU: 56.7% (new tab)huggingface.co
- MMLU: 77.4%; GSM8K: 78.9% (new tab)github.com
- MMLU: 84.2% for the 72B; HumanEval: 86.0% for the 72B Instruct (new tab)qwenlm.github.io
- MMLU: 86.1% for the 72B; GPQA: 49.0% for the 72B Instruct (new tab)qwenlm.github.io
- GPQA: 65.2%; AIME: 50.0% (new tab)qwenlm.github.io
- The announcement (new tab)qwenlm.github.io
- The Qwen3 announcement (new tab)qwenlm.github.io
- SWE-bench Verified: 69.6% (new tab)alibabacloud.com
- GPQA: 88.4%; SWE-bench Verified: 76.4% (new tab)huggingface.co
- SWE-bench Verified: 80.4%; GPQA Diamond: 92.4%; HLE: 41.4% (new tab)alibabacloud.com
- The announcement (new tab)alibabacloud.com
- GPQA Diamond: 92.6%; HLE: 43.6% (new tab)huggingface.co
- A security review (new tab)huggingface.co
- The announcement (new tab)github.com
- MMLU: 40.63% (new tab)github.com
- MMLU: 61.4%; GSM8K: 72.3% (new tab)github.com
- The model card (new tab)huggingface.co
- 3rd of all the models compared, closed and open, with an average of 63.2 over 12 benchmarks (new tab)huggingface.co
- SWE-bench Verified: 64.2% (new tab)arxiv.org
- The model card (new tab)huggingface.co
- SWE-bench Verified: 68.0% (new tab)huggingface.co
- SWE-bench Verified: 77.8%; HLE: 30.5% without tools, 50.4% with (new tab)huggingface.co
- SWE-bench Pro: 58.4%; HLE: 31.0% without tools, 52.3% with (new tab)huggingface.co
- SWE-bench Pro: 62.1%; GPQA Diamond: 91.2% (new tab)huggingface.co
- Terminal-Bench 2.1: 88.2%; HLE with tools: 62.5% (new tab)huggingface.co
- Display “Kimi K2” in the interface (new tab)huggingface.co
- A separate agreement (new tab)huggingface.co
- AIME: 77.5; MATH 500: 96.2; MathVista: 74.9 (new tab)arxiv.org
- SWE-bench Verified: 65.8%; GPQA Diamond: 75.1%; MMLU: 89.5% (new tab)kimi.ai
- HLE with tools: 44.9%; SWE-bench Verified: 71.3% (new tab)kimi.ai
- HLE: 30.1% without tools, 50.2% with; SWE-bench Verified: 76.8% (new tab)huggingface.co
- SWE-bench Verified: 80.2%; GPQA Diamond: 90.5% (new tab)huggingface.co
- Terminal-Bench 2.1: 88.3%; GPQA Diamond: 93.5% (new tab)huggingface.co
- HLE: 43.5% without tools, 56.0% with (new tab)github.com
- AI Index 2025 report (new tab)hai.stanford.edu
- Arena (new tab)arena.ai
Treated as having “High” capability in cybersecurity
Read on deploymentsafety.openai.com(new tab)MMLU: 86.4%; HumanEval: 67.0%; simulated bar exam: around the top 10% of candidates
Read on arxiv.org(new tab)MMLU: 92.9%; GPQA: 82.8%; MATH-500: 97.8% for o3; GPQA: 77.6% for o4-mini
Read on github.com(new tab)HealthBench Professional, adjusted for answer length: 60.5 for Sol, 8.7 points more than GPT-5.5
Read on deploymentsafety.openai.com(new tab)Internal agentic coding evaluation: 64% of problems solved, against 38% for Claude 3 Opus
Read on anthropic.com(new tab)SWE-bench Verified: 49.0%, against 33.4%; OSWorld, screenshot only: 14.9%
Read on anthropic.com(new tab)SWE-bench: 72.5% for Opus 4, 72.7% for Sonnet 4; Terminal-bench: 43.2% for Opus 4
Read on anthropic.com(new tab)SWE-bench Verified: 77.2%, averaged over 10 attempts; OSWorld: 61.4%
Read on anthropic.com(new tab)At the medium setting, Sonnet 4.5’s best score on SWE-bench Verified with 76% fewer tokens
Read on anthropic.com(new tab)Search in a very long text (MRCR v2, one million tokens): 76%, against 18.5% for Sonnet 4.5
Read on anthropic.com(new tab)HLE: 18.8% without tools, SWE-bench Verified: 63.8% with a custom agent
Read on blog.google(new tab)LLaMA-13B beats GPT-3 on most benchmarks, LLaMA-65B rivals Chinchilla-70B and PaLM-540B
Read on arxiv.org(new tab)AIME 2025: 93.3% at the highest compute setting; GPQA: 84.6%; LiveCodeBench: 79.4%
Read on x.ai(new tab)ARC-AGI-2: 15.9%, a record for a closed model; HLE, text-only questions: 50.7% for Grok 4 Heavy
Read on x.ai(new tab)GPQA Diamond: 85.7%; AIME 2025 without tools: 92.0%; HLE without tools: 20.0%
Read on x.ai(new tab)LMArena ranking (text): 1st with 1,483 Elo points for Grok 4.1 Thinking; preferred 64.78% of the time over the previous model
Read on x.ai(new tab)Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index: 61, at the level of GPT-5.6 Sol; CursorBench 3.2: 69.9%; DeepSWE 1.1: 65.9%
Read on x.ai(new tab)CursorBench 4.0: 46.3%; DeepSWE 1.1: 71.0% at high effort; Terminal-Bench 4.0: 37.6%
Read on x.ai(new tab)MMLU: 71.3% for the base version; HumanEval: 73.78% for the Chat version
Read on github.com(new tab)MMLU: 78.5% for the base version; HumanEval: 81.1% for the Chat version
Read on huggingface.co(new tab)GPQA Diamond: 71.5%; AIME 2024: 79.8%; SWE-bench Verified: 49.2%
Read on huggingface.co(new tab)GPQA Diamond: 80.1% with thinking; SWE-bench Verified: 66.0% in agent mode, without thinking
Read on huggingface.co(new tab)MMLU: 84.2% for the 72B; HumanEval: 86.0% for the 72B Instruct
Read on qwenlm.github.io(new tab)MMLU: 86.1% for the 72B; GPQA: 49.0% for the 72B Instruct
Read on qwenlm.github.io(new tab)SWE-bench Verified: 80.4%; GPQA Diamond: 92.4%; HLE: 41.4%
Read on alibabacloud.com(new tab)3rd of all the models compared, closed and open, with an average of 63.2 over 12 benchmarks
Read on huggingface.co(new tab)SWE-bench Verified: 77.8%; HLE: 30.5% without tools, 50.4% with
Read on huggingface.co(new tab)HLE: 30.1% without tools, 50.2% with; SWE-bench Verified: 76.8%
Read on huggingface.co(new tab)Jim · founder of Brain Plus AI
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