Models

The Big Three

Frontier

• ChatGPT — OpenAI’s flagship. Broadest feature set in one place: voice, vision, images, code, apps.
• Claude — Anthropic’s model. Strong on long documents and writing; Cowork and Code for agentic work.
• Gemini — Google has focused on deep integration with Google products, and is less generally capable except for best-in-class image generation.

Checked 2026-07-24

Other Proprietary Models

Frontier

• Grok — Designed with extreme personalities and a political bias. Real-time access to X.
• Copilot — Microsoft’s ChatGPT-based assistant. If your institution provides it in MS Office you may be FERPA and HIPAA secure.
• Ernie — Baidu’s multimodal frontier model. Ernie X1 is the reasoning version.
• Sonus — Family of proprietary models: Pro, Air, Mini, and Pro with Reasoning.
• Amazon Nova — Amazon’s model family, available through Bedrock.
• MAI-Thinking-1 — Microsoft’s first in-house model. Medium-size, built for math, coding and enterprise use.

Education

• EduGPT — Built for security, privacy and education use. One of a series of EU models from CivAI.

Privacy

• Euria — Swiss Infomaniak model. Privacy-focused, renewable powered, recovered energy heats homes.
• Thaura — Free model from two Syrian engineers. Dedicated to global justice; no training on your data, no military contracts.

Conversation

• Pi — Focused on emotional intelligence, dialogue and role-playing. Talks but cannot hear.

Search

• You.com — Started as a privacy-focused search competitor; now focused on specialized API.

Checked 2026-07-24

Open Weight Models

Frontier

• Inkling — From Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines. Mixture-of-Experts, 1M token context.
• Kimi — Huge free multimodal Chinese model with a very large context window. Strong on math and coding. Full K3 weights released July 2026 — the largest open-weight model ever.
• Z.ai (GLM) — Beijing’s GLM series rivals Western proprietary models at lower cost. Usable without logging in. GLM-5.3 (August 2026) runs on the same base model as 5.2 — every gain came from more post-training, which is worth knowing if you think bigger always means better. Weights promised after safety testing.
• DeepSeek — Strong text and math; built for a fraction of the cost through Multi-head Latent Attention. Free to download.
• Qwen — Alibaba’s open-weight range with a slider for reasoning level. Guest mode available. In August 2026 Alibaba opened its top-tier model as well: Qwen3.8-Max, 2.4 trillion parameters with 95 billion active and a 1M-token context. The benchmark claims are Alibaba’s own.
• Meta AI — Meta’s model family; may not require a login.
• Mistral — French open-source LLM. Fast, more multilingual than the big three, with press-wire news access.
• MiniMax — Chinese company with open-source reasoning models (M1), video and agent tools.
• Deep Cogito — Open-weight reasoning models. Current release is Cogito v2.1, a 671B model finetuned from DeepSeek.
• HuggingChat — Chatbot running on Llama. A good place to see what open source can do. No login required.
• Nemotron 3.5 Lightning — NVIDIA’s 30B open-weight model, built to be the fast cheap worker an agent calls ten thousand times, not the brain that plans the job. Weights, training data and recipes all released.
• K2 Horizon — Six models from 0.9B to 375B, released 3 September 2026 by MBZUAI’s Institute of Foundation Models in Abu Dhabi under Apache 2.0, with weights, code and training data. Benchmark claims are the institute’s own.

Reasoning

• Magistral — Mistral’s reasoning version.
• MiMo — Xiaomi’s open-source reasoning model.

Checked 2026-07-24

Regional & Culturally-Specific

North America

• Latimer — Named for Lewis Latimer. Trained further on licensed books, oral histories and sources from Black and Brown communities.

Latin America

• LatamGPT — Open-weight model from Chile’s CENIA trained on characteristic data from Latin America.
• Maritaca AI — Brazilian Portuguese chatbot and the Sabia family of fine-tuned models.
• Rio 3.5 Open 397B — Open-weight Portuguese and English model from IplanRIO, the City of Rio de Janeiro’s IT company, under an MIT license. Built by merging two models and distilling from a stronger one; the model card says the weights first uploaded were the wrong version and a correction is pending.

Middle East

• Fanar — Culturally and regionally aware Arabic LLM from Qatar’s MCIT and QCRI, fluent in Arabic dialects.
• Falcon — UAE open-weight model using state space architecture instead of transformers. Handles many dialects.
• Mistral Saba — 24B Mistral trained on curated Middle East and South Asian data. Arabic and Indian-origin languages.
• Jais — Trained on the largest Arabic dataset used for an open-source foundational model. Inception rebranded to Inception42; Jais 2 released with Cerebras and MBZUAI.
• Qalam — Arabic writing and translation tool with plagiarism detection and sentiment analysis.
• Humain — Saudi model in Arabic and English, working with Qualcomm. Also makes an AI laptop.
• PersianLLaMA — 13B model fine-tuned on Persian Wikipedia.
• Karnak Chat — Egyptian government chat assistant built on Karnak, the national Arabic model from the Ministry of Communications’ Applied Innovation Center. Handles Modern Standard Arabic and Egyptian colloquial. Beta; sign-in required.
• K2 Horizon — Six models from 0.9B to 375B, released 3 September 2026 by MBZUAI’s Institute of Foundation Models in Abu Dhabi under Apache 2.0, with weights, code and training data. Benchmark claims are the institute’s own.

Europe and Russia

• Soofi S — German open-weight model funded by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs. Industrial and enterprise focus.
• AMALIA — Fully open-source 9B model natively trained in European Portuguese. Launched July 2026.
• Apertus — Swiss National Supercomputing Centre. 1000 languages, 40% non-English data, fully open development.
• OpenLLM-Ro — Set of LLaMA fine-tuned Romanian models.
• Bielik — Open-source family with deep integration of Polish language and cultural context.
• GigaChat — Open source Russian language model. Useful as a cultural model even where others score higher on MERA.
• UCCIX — Irish language LLM.
• Latxa — Family of LLaMA-based Basque models.

Africa

• Vulavula — Speaks, transcribes and translates low-resource African languages including isiZulu, Sesotho and African French.
• EthioLLM — Trained on Amharic, Ge’ez, Afan Oromo, Somali, Tigrinya and English.

South Asia

• Airavata — 7B model optimized for Hindi, from AI4Bharat.
• Nanda — Hindi-English open-weight model from G42 and MBZUAI. NANDA 87B, built on Llama 3.1 and trained on 65 billion Hindi tokens, released December 2025. No public model page could be found.
• Sarvam — India’s flagship AI lab: models built for Indian languages with India-hosted inference. A trillion-parameter model is announced but not yet released.
• BharatGen — India’s government-funded multimodal LLM initiative, fluent in 22+ Indian languages. Anchored by IIT Bombay.

Southeast Asia

• SEA-Lion — Open source LLM for Southeast Asian languages: Indonesian, Thai, Vietnamese, Filipino, Burmese, Khmer, Malay, Tamil, Lao.
• Komodo — First LLM built on Indonesian languages including Banjarese, Sundanese, Balinese and Toba Batak.
• Typhoon — Set of open source models optimized for Thai.

East Asia

• Doubao — ByteDance model with voice mode; one of the most popular AIs in China.
• Hy — Tencent’s Hy3 (July 2026, formerly Hunyuan) is an open-weight MoE: 295B total parameters, only 21B active, 256K context, Apache 2.0 licensed.
• TAIDE — 7B model grounded in Taiwanese culture, language, values and customs.
• Fugaku-LLM — Japanese-language model built on the RIKEN supercomputer Fugaku. Unrelated to Sakana’s Fugu.
• HyperCLOVA — Naver’s model, designed to understand Korean in its societal context.

Central Asia

• Sherkala — Pre-trained on Kazakh and English with some Russian and Turkish.

Checked 2026-07-24

Science & Math

Research

• Edison Platform — Single environment for scientific R&D. Commercial spinout of FutureHouse with multiple agents.
• Kosmos — Lab-in-the-loop AI scientist. One run reads ~1,500 papers and executes ~42,000 lines of code, fully auditable.
• Lila — Scientific AI connected to autonomous laboratories. Trained on 10 trillion tokens of scientific reasoning data.

Earth Science

• OlmoEarth — Foundation models for Earth observation and remote sensing: mangrove change, forest loss, crop-type maps.

Math

• WolframAlpha — Combines Wolfram Alpha’s computational power with ChatGPT.
• AlphaGeometry 2 — Competes at gold-medal IMO level. Not generally available.
• Numina-Lean-Agent — Uses standard models to do formal math reasoning.
• Mathstral — Built on Mistral 7B for scientific discovery and mathematical reasoning. Open source.
• Aristotle — Harmonic’s theorem prover. Takes a problem in English, formalises it, and returns a machine-checked proof in Lean; it can also work inside an existing Lean project. Its IMO gold-medal result is reported in the company’s own preprint. Login required.

Physics

• Walrus — Trained on real scientific datasets rather than text. Domain is fluids and fluid-like systems.
• MatterChat — Berkeley Lab bridge model connecting an LLM with physics-based interatomic potentials.

Astronomy

• AION-1 — Trained on data from astronomical surveys. Polymathic AI collaboration with Cambridge.

Chemistry

• Ether0 — 24B reasoning model built on Mistral-Small-24B, post-trained for chemistry.

Materials

• SCIGEN — MIT model steering generation toward materials with quantum structures like Kagome lattices.

Checked 2026-07-24

World Models

A world model generates a space you move through rather than a clip you watch: you steer a camera and the model renders what comes next, keeping objects where you left them. That persistence is the difference from a video generator. Access is the current constraint – only one of these three is open to subscribers today.

Frontier

• Atlas — World Labs’ omni world model: generates, reconstructs and simulates 3D scenes from text, images, video or 3D data. Early access by request; World Labs says it will power future versions of Marble.
• Solaris — Runway’s interface world model: it draws an interactive app frame by frame as you use it, with no code underneath. Early access by request.
• Genie 3 — Google DeepMind’s world model, reached through Project Genie: a text or image prompt becomes an environment you walk through in real time. Requires a Google AI Ultra subscription and a US account.
• Marble — World Labs’ world model. Generates an explorable 3D scene from text, an image, a video or a rough 3D layout. Its Chisel tool blocks out scene structure in simple shapes first, then applies style separately.

Checked 2026-09-03

Historical LLMs

Historical

• Mr Chatterbox (Victorian) — Trained from scratch on 28,000 Victorian-era British texts, 1837-1899, from the British Library.
• TimeCapsuleLLM — Student-built model trained on 1800-1875 London texts to speak Victorian.
• Talkie — 13B model trained only on pre-1931 public domain text.
• MonadGPT — Trained on 11,000 texts from 1400-1700 using 17th-century knowledge frameworks.
• Latin BERT — Contextual language model for Latin.
• XunziALLM — Uses the formal rules of classical Chinese poetry.
• CuneiScribe — Reads Akkadian clay tablets and writes new ones. Type English, get cuneiform rendered as a tablet image, and it tells you when it is guessing. Published as TabletCraft (arXiv 2608.02609). Its own Gilgamesh demo mistranslates the famous opening line.

Checked 2026-07-24

Small Models & Edge AI

Small

• Phi-4 — Microsoft’s small open-weight family, with a reasoning variant. Supersedes Phi-3.5.
• OpenELM — Apple’s small model family, 270M-3B parameters.
• Gemma — Google’s open source smaller model, several sizes. Not the same as Gemini.

Checked 2026-07-24

Classifiers & Decision Models

These don’t write. They take text in and return a decision (classify, route, score, pick) with a confidence score, fast and cheap enough to sit inside a workflow. The waiter, not the chef.

Classifiers

• Jev — TypeSafe AI’s first “System One” model (Sept 2026). No text output: typed decisions with probabilities. Claims 193x faster and 445x cheaper than frontier models on its own tests; early independent tests are small but favorable, and one found its raw confidence scores overconfident.

Checked 2026-09-22

How Models Are Scored

Benchmarks

• EpochAI — Independent tracking of models and capabilities, with a benchmarks dashboard and a dataset of notable models.
• Arena — Head-to-head leaderboards, including text-to-image. Renamed from LMArena, formerly Chatbot Arena.
• MERA — Leaderboard for Russian-language tasks. A good example of why English-only benchmarks mislead.

Tracking

• Ithaka S+R Product Tracker — A longer list of AI products marketed to faculty and students.

Checked 2026-07-24