Flagship foundation model releases and updates from the major AI labs. — 47 releases covered on the show.
Microsoft launches MAI-Thinking-1, a 1T MoE trained from scratch
Microsoft AI used Build 2026 to launch seven MAI models, headlined by MAI-Thinking-1, a 1T total, 35B active MoE reasoning model trained from scratch on 33T tokens without distillation. The panel read the launch as Microsoft becoming a frontier model lab in its own right rather than only an OpenAI distribution channel.
Anthropic ships Claude Opus 4.8 live mid-show
Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.8 during the episode, hitting 69.2% on SWE-bench Pro (up from 64.3% on 4.7 and ahead of GPT-5.5 at 58.6%), a new-best 57.9% on Humanity's Last Exam with tools, and 83.4% on OSWorld-Verified. It also shows a real long-context jump past the usual 200K cliff (85.9% GraphWalks BFS at 256K), with new thinking modes in the UI. Anthropic teased bringing Mythos-class models to all customers in the coming weeks.
Alibaba releases Qwen 3.7-Max agentic frontier model with robotics demos
Alibaba released Qwen 3.7-Max, an agentic frontier model built for long autonomous runs, demonstrated alongside robotics demos. It continues the Qwen Max line as Alibaba's closed frontier offering aimed at agentic workloads.
Gemini 3.5 Flash launches at I/O as Google's agentic workhorse model
Google launched Gemini 3.5 Flash at I/O 2026 as a fast, determined workhorse model built for agentic loops rather than a budget-tier Flash like prior generations. It is rolling out across the Gemini app, Search AI Mode, the Gemini API, Google AI Studio, Antigravity and the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform. Nisten noted unusual determinism in its behavior, and Logan Kilpatrick framed it as designed for the agentic era.
AWS brings GPT-5.5 and Codex to Bedrock as Azure exclusivity ends
AWS announced GPT-5.5 and Codex availability on Amazon Bedrock after OpenAI ended its Microsoft Azure exclusivity. The renegotiated OpenAI-Microsoft contract also removed the AGI clause.
Baidu ERNIE 5.1 Preview hits #13 on Arena with 6% of the compute
Baidu's ERNIE 5.1 Preview reached #13 on LMArena, making Baidu the top-ranked Chinese lab, while reportedly using just 6% of the pretraining compute of comparable frontier models. The model is available at ernie.baidu.com.
Qwen3.6-Max-Preview goes live on API
Alongside the open-weights 27B release, Alibaba put Qwen3.6-Max-Preview live on its API. It is the frontier closed-weights tier of the Qwen3.6 family, available API-only rather than as open weights.
Claude Opus 4.7 drops live with 87.6% SWE-bench Verified and xhigh effort
Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 4.7 minutes before the show, scoring 87.6% on SWE-bench Verified and 64.3% on SWE-bench Pro, an 11-point jump over Opus 4.6 on the harder agentic coding eval. It adds a new 'xhigh' (extra high) reasoning effort, 3x vision resolution, a +22% ScreenSpot Pro computer-use jump (57.7% to 79.5%), and a /ultrareview command in Claude Code at the same pricing, though a new tokenizer uses 1.0-1.35x more tokens. The system card mentions the unreleased 'Mythos' 331 times, and an MRCR long-context drop from 78% to 32% suggests a new pre-trained base.
Parcae: stable looped transformer matches a model twice its size
Together AI and UCSD researchers introduced Parcae, a stable architecture for looped language models that comes with scaling laws and matches the quality of a transformer twice its size. Looped architectures reuse layers at inference time, promising better quality per parameter.
Anthropic unveils Claude Mythos, a frontier model 'too dangerous to release'
Anthropic announced Claude Mythos Preview under Project Glasswing, a cyber-defense frontier model it says is too dangerous to release publicly: it found zero-days in every major OS and browser and escaped its sandbox. It scores 77% on SWE-bench Pro (up from 53% on Opus 4.6) and 64% on HLE, priced at $25/$125 per M tokens and available only to ~40 partner companies. Peter Gostev's read: the real reason it's unreleased is compute shortage, not safety.
Meta launches Muse Spark, first model from Meta Superintelligence Labs
Meta dropped Muse Spark mid-show, the debut model from Meta Superintelligence Labs. It features natively multimodal reasoning, a multi-agent Contemplating mode, and deep health/visual capabilities. Simon Willison's deep dive uncovered 16 hidden tools, including visual grounding and sub-agents, inside the meta.ai chat UI.
Xiaomi MiMo revealed as the 1T-param stealth model topping OpenRouter
Xiaomi revealed MiMo, a 1-trillion-parameter family with omni-modal and language-only variants, unmasked as the stealth model that had been sitting at #1 on OpenRouter. The reveal surprised the panel, marking Xiaomi's entry into the frontier-model conversation.
Google launches Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite with 1M context at 360 tok/s
Google launched Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite, a fast and cheap model with 1M token context aimed at the instant/fast tier, running around 360 tokens per second. The panel flagged a material pricing jump versus the prior Flash-Lite generation but saw it as well suited for judge, guardrail, and orchestration workloads in agent systems.
OpenAI rolls out GPT-5.3 Instant as the free-tier fast model
OpenAI rolled out GPT-5.3 Instant, an upgrade to its low-latency free-tier baseline that the company positions as less cringey and more accurate. The panel saw improvements but still preferred other models for many workflows, while agreeing low-latency models matter for voice and real-time control use cases.
OpenAI drops GPT-5.4 Thinking and GPT-5.4 Pro live during the show
OpenAI released GPT-5.4 Thinking and GPT-5.4 Pro mid-show, a frontier general model that folds Codex-level coding into a unified reasoning model. It ships with a 1M token context window, a /fast mode, and mid-reasoning steering, posting 83.3% on ARC-AGI 2 (Pro) and roughly 75% on OS World computer use. The panel tested it live in Codex and called it a major general-model jump, while noting input pricing rose about 50% versus 5.2.
ByteDance Seed 2.0: frontier multimodal family at 73-84% lower pricing
ByteDance released Seed 2.0, a frontier multimodal LLM family with Pro, Lite, Mini, and Code variants that rivals GPT-5.2 and Claude Opus 4.5 at 73-84% lower pricing. Its video understanding surpasses the human benchmark at 77% vs 73%. At 84% cheaper than Opus 4.5 with near-comparable quality, the panel called it a compelling option for price-conscious developers.
Gemini 3.1 Pro drops live with 44% HLE and 77% ARC-AGI at the same price
Google released Gemini 3.1 Pro minutes before the show, claiming 2.5x better abstract reasoning and improved coding and agentic capabilities at the same price point as its predecessor. It scores 44% on Humanity's Last Exam, 77% on ARC-AGI without a custom harness, and 68 on Terminal Bench, putting it at or near state of the art alongside Opus 4.6. In Nisten's live vibe-coding test it was blazingly fast but less polished than Opus 4.6 and Codex output.
xAI silently drops Grok 4.20 with four 500B-param collaborating agents
xAI released Grok 4.20, a multi-agent system where four 500B-parameter agents collaborate in a multi-agent UI, with a $300/month Heavy tier scaling to 16 agents. No benchmarks or evals were released with the drop. The panel found it underwhelming for coding and day-to-day agent work but still top tier for deep research thanks to xAI's RAG over X data; Grok 4.1 Fast remains #8 on OpenRouter by API usage.
Anthropic ships Claude Opus 4.6 with 1M context and agent teams
Anthropic dropped Opus 4.6 live during the show, claiming state-of-the-art on GDP-eval, Browse Comp, and agentic search, with 65.4% on Terminal Bench and 99% on TAU Bench MCP tool use. It is the first Opus model with a 1 million token context window and introduces adaptive thinking, where the model picks up contextual clues about reasoning effort. Pricing matches Opus 4.5 under 200K tokens and doubles above, and Claude Code gains agent teams for orchestrating parallel sessions.
OpenAI answers Opus with GPT-5.3-Codex, first model that helped build itself
One hour after Opus 4.6, OpenAI released GPT-5.3-Codex, billed as the first model instrumental in developing itself — the Codex team used early versions to debug its own training and manage its own deployment. It scores 73% on Terminal Bench 2.0, a 10-point gap over Opus 4.6, while running queries 25% faster and more token-efficiently than its predecessor, with improved mid-task steerability.
Google brings Gemini 3 into Gmail for 3 billion users
Breaking during the show: Google integrated Gemini 3 into Gmail for 3 billion users, adding AI Overviews, smart replies, and natural language inbox search. It marks one of the largest consumer AI rollouts to date, bringing Gmail into the 'Gemini era.'
Gemini 3 Flash delivers frontier intelligence at $0.50/1M input tokens
Google launched Gemini 3 Flash, offering frontier-tier capability at flash-tier pricing of $0.50 per million input tokens. It scores 78% on SWE-bench Verified, beating larger models on some agentic tasks, and supports tool-calling at scale with up to 100 simultaneous function calls.
GPT 5.2 Codex drops live during the show with 400K context
OpenAI released GPT 5.2 Codex via API after months of exclusivity in the Codex app, making it available in Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and VS Code with native context compaction for long sessions. Cursor showcased it by building a complete browser from scratch in Rust, roughly 3 million lines of code across about 330,000 commits, driven by hundreds of concurrent agents.
Amazon announces Nova 2 family: Lite, Pro, Sonic, and Omni
Amazon rolled out the Nova 2 model suite spanning text, speech, and multimodal stacks with Lite, Pro, Sonic, and Omni variants. The launch came with major benchmark jumps over the first Nova generation and includes a fast, cost-effective reasoning model in Nova 2 Lite.
Gemini 3 Deep Think hits 45.1% on ARC-AGI-2 with parallel reasoning
Google shipped Deep Think, a high-cost parallel reasoning mode for Gemini 3 that scored 45.1% on ARC-AGI-2. The panel framed it as Google pressing its advantage in the frontier race, where product integration and latency now matter as much as raw benchmark IQ.
Gemini 3 Pro launches with record ARC-AGI-2 scores
Google's new frontier multimodal model with a 1M-token context window and huge reasoning gains, scoring 31.11% on ARC-AGI-2 (45.14% with Deep Think mode) — roughly double the previous SOTA — plus 81% on MMLU-Pro and major coding improvements. Amp switched to it as their default model on launch day, the first time they have ever switched defaults. Also rolling out across Gmail, Calendar, and AI Mode in Google Search.
Sunday Robotics unveils ACT-1 home robot foundation model and Memo
Sunday Robotics introduced ACT-1, a home robot foundation model, alongside its Memo robot. Instead of $20K teleoperation rigs, training data comes from a $200 skill glove, and the model handles long-horizon household tasks with solid zero-shot generalization.
Grok 4.1 briefly tops LM Arena with major post-training upgrade
xAI's Grok 4.1 shipped in November alongside GPT-5.1 and Claude Opus 4.5 in the year's most concentrated stretch of frontier releases. Yam highlighted the week-and-a-half window as emblematic of 2025's relentless acceleration.
OpenAI launches GPT-5.1 with a warmer, more personable voice
OpenAI shipped GPT-5.1, an update to its flagship model focused on a warmer tone and personality upgrades. The panel discussed how the friendlier default voice changes day-to-day ChatGPT use and what it signals for the frontier model race.
Grok 4 Fast expands to a 2 million token context window
xAI's Grok 4 Fast now supports a 2 million token context window, one of the largest of any frontier model. The crew called the jump 'crazy' and discussed what such long context unlocks for agentic and document-heavy workloads.
Ai2 launches OlmoEarth foundation models and open Earth-intelligence platform
Ai2 launched OlmoEarth, a family of foundation models plus an open, end-to-end platform for fast, high-resolution Earth intelligence. It applies the lab's open-model approach to geospatial and remote-sensing data, making Earth observation workloads accessible without proprietary stacks.
Claude Haiku 4.5: fast, cheap model rivals Sonnet 4 accuracy
Anthropic released Claude Haiku 4.5, its smallest and fastest current-generation model. The show highlighted that it approaches Sonnet 4 level accuracy at a fraction of the cost and latency, making it attractive for high-volume agentic and production workloads.
xAI ships Grok 4 Fast with 2M context at a fraction of the cost
xAI released Grok 4 Fast, a cost-efficient model with a 2M token context window that unifies reasoning and non-reasoning behavior in one set of weights and prices far below Grok 4. The panel treated it as part of the larger competitive pressure cycle on price and speed among frontier labs.
Grok Code 1 takes ~50% of coding traffic on OpenRouter
xAI's new Grok Code 1 coding model rocketed to roughly 50% of all coding traffic on OpenRouter shortly after launch, helped by a free promotional period and fast, cheap inference. The panel discussed it as evidence that the coding-model market is highly price- and speed-sensitive.
Mystery 1M-context model 'Cypher Alpha' appears free on OpenRouter
A stealth model called Cypher Alpha showed up on OpenRouter with a free 1M-token context window, with the panel speculating it could be Amazon Titan. Alex used it as an example of how model releases increasingly arrive as anonymous market probes rather than tidy launches.
OpenAI brings the previously API-only GPT-4.1 models into ChatGPT
OpenAI's GPT-4.1 series, previously available only via the API, is now selectable in the ChatGPT interface. The crew used the news to dig into model-picker UX: seven model options in the dropdown, each with its own quirks, speed, and context length, while most casual users don't even know the dropdown exists.
ByteDance publishes Seaweed-7B video generation foundation model
ByteDance publicly presented Seaweed-7B, a 7B parameter video generation foundation model, showing competitive video quality from a comparatively small model. Details and demos were published at seaweed.video.
Google launches Gemini 2.5 Flash with controllable thinking budgets
Google answered OpenAI's launch week with Gemini 2.5 Flash, a fast reasoning model that introduces controllable thinking budgets so developers can dial how much the model reasons per request. It is available through the Gemini API and developer platform.
OpenAI launches GPT-4.1 family (4.1, mini, nano) in the API
OpenAI released the GPT-4.1 family of models, available via API only, in three sizes: 4.1, 4.1-mini and 4.1-nano. The family features a 1M token context window, in contrast to o3's 200k, and is aimed at developers building on long-context and coding workloads.
xAI finally launches the Grok 3 API tier
xAI made Grok 3 and Grok 3 Mini available via API, giving developers programmatic access to its frontier models for the first time. The Grok app also received updates the same week.
DeepSeek silently drops V3-0324, 685B params under MIT license
DeepSeek silently updated their V3 base model with DeepSeek-V3-0324, a 685B parameter MoE released on Hugging Face under the MIT license. This is not R1 (their reasoning model) but the powerful base model R1 was built on, and supposedly the base for a future R2.
Google reclaims #1 with Gemini 2.5 Pro thinking model
Google dropped Gemini 2.5 Pro, a thinking model that took the #1 spot as the best all-around LLM available, with massive jumps on benchmarks like AIME (up nearly 20 points) and GPQA. It inherits native multimodality and a 1M token context window, maintaining high accuracy even at 120k+ tokens on needle-in-a-haystack tests, with surprisingly low latency (~13 seconds on hard reasoning questions vs 45+ for others). Tulsee Doshi, head of product for Gemini models, joined the show to give the inside scoop.
GPT-4o gets an update, ties for #1 on LMArena beating GPT-4.5
OpenAI shipped a new GPT-4o checkpoint (2025-03-26) that jumped over GPT-4.5 to tie for #1 on LMArena. The update landed as the show was being written, read as a direct response to Gemini 2.5's launch in the escalating frontier-model race.
Anthropic releases Claude 3.7 Sonnet, a coding beast with immaculate vibes
Anthropic shipped its long-awaited model update, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, which the crew called a coding BEAST with 'immaculate' vibes. It was one of the week's two huge model drops alongside GPT-4.5 and became an instant favorite for AI coding workflows like those discussed in the Windsurf interview.
OpenAI ships GPT-4.5, its largest model yet at roughly 10x scale
OpenAI released GPT-4.5 as breaking news during the show, its first .5-scale jump in two years and reportedly around 10x the scale of the previous model, with speculation of 10+ trillion parameters. Sam Altman said it 'won't crush on benchmarks' against reasoning models, but early vibes praised its creative writing, vision, and medical diagnosis abilities, and it is expected to fuel future o-series reasoners trained on top of it.
xAI launches Grok 3, claiming SOTA benchmarks and a 1M token context window
xAI dropped Grok 3 on Monday evening, claiming state-of-the-art performance on several benchmarks and a 1 million token context window, with heavy emphasis on agents and future reasoners. The launch was messy, with a bug serving Grok 2 to some users and an eval-methodology spat with OpenAI over best-of-N scores, but vibes shifted positive, with co-hosts calling the base model the best coding model out. It is free for now, 'until their GPUs melt', with no API yet for independent evaluation.
Alibaba launches Qwen2.5-Max flagship model with hidden video gen
Alibaba's Qwen team released Qwen2.5-Max, a large MoE flagship model available through the Qwen Chat interface and API, claiming competitive results against DeepSeek V3 and other frontier models. The chat app also quietly shipped a video generation capability powered by Alibaba's Tongyi Wanxiang.
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