Best Foundation Models - Page 5
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Compare the Top Foundation Models as of October 2026 - Page 5
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1
Llama 4 Scout
Meta
Llama 4 Scout is a powerful 17 billion active parameter multimodal AI model that excels in both text and image processing. With an industry-leading context length of 10 million tokens, it outperforms its predecessors, including Llama 3, in tasks such as multi-document summarization and parsing large codebases. Llama 4 Scout is designed to handle complex reasoning tasks while maintaining high efficiency, making it perfect for use cases requiring long-context comprehension and image grounding. It offers cutting-edge performance in image-related tasks and is particularly well-suited for applications requiring both text and visual understanding.Starting Price: Free -
2
GPT-4.1 mini
OpenAI
GPT-4.1 mini is a compact version of OpenAI’s powerful GPT-4.1 model, designed to provide high performance while significantly reducing latency and cost. With a smaller size and optimized architecture, GPT-4.1 mini still delivers impressive results in tasks such as coding, instruction following, and long-context processing. It supports up to 1 million tokens of context, making it an efficient solution for applications that require fast responses without sacrificing accuracy or depth.Starting Price: $0.40 per 1M tokens (input) -
3
GPT-4.1 nano
OpenAI
GPT-4.1 nano is the smallest and most efficient version of OpenAI's GPT-4.1 model, optimized for low-latency, cost-effective AI processing. Despite its compact size, GPT-4.1 nano delivers strong performance with a 1 million token context window, making it ideal for applications like classification, autocompletion, and smaller-scale tasks that require fast responses. It provides a highly efficient solution for businesses and developers who need an AI model that balances speed, cost, and performance.Starting Price: $0.10 per 1M tokens (input) -
4
GPT-5 mini
OpenAI
GPT-5 mini is a streamlined, faster, and more affordable variant of OpenAI’s GPT-5, optimized for well-defined tasks and precise prompts. It supports text and image inputs and delivers high-quality text outputs with a 400,000-token context window and up to 128,000 output tokens. This model excels at rapid response times, making it suitable for applications requiring fast, accurate language understanding without the full overhead of GPT-5. Pricing is cost-effective, with input tokens at $0.25 per million and output tokens at $2 per million, providing savings over the flagship model. GPT-5 mini supports advanced features like streaming, function calling, structured outputs, and fine-tuning, but does not support audio input or image generation. It integrates well with various API endpoints including chat completions, responses, and embeddings, making it versatile for many AI-powered tasks.Starting Price: $0.25 per 1M tokens -
5
GPT-5 nano
OpenAI
GPT-5 nano is OpenAI’s fastest and most affordable version of the GPT-5 family, designed for high-speed text processing tasks like summarization and classification. It supports text and image inputs, generating high-quality text outputs with a large 400,000-token context window and up to 128,000 output tokens. GPT-5 nano offers very fast response times, making it ideal for applications requiring quick turnaround without sacrificing quality. Pricing is extremely competitive, with input tokens costing $0.05 per million and output tokens $0.40 per million, making it accessible for budget-conscious projects. The model supports advanced API features such as streaming, function calling, structured outputs, and fine-tuning. While it supports image input, it does not handle audio input or web search, focusing on core text tasks efficiently.Starting Price: $0.05 per 1M tokens -
6
NVIDIA Cosmos
NVIDIA
NVIDIA Cosmos is a developer-first platform of state-of-the-art generative World Foundation Models (WFMs), advanced video tokenizers, guardrails, and an accelerated data processing and curation pipeline designed to supercharge physical AI development. It enables developers working on autonomous vehicles, robotics, and video analytics AI agents to generate photorealistic, physics-aware synthetic video data, trained on an immense dataset including 20 million hours of real-world and simulated video, to rapidly simulate future scenarios, train world models, and fine‑tune custom behaviors. It includes three core WFM types; Cosmos Predict, capable of generating up to 30 seconds of continuous video from multimodal inputs; Cosmos Transfer, which adapts simulations across environments and lighting for versatile domain augmentation; and Cosmos Reason, a vision-language model that applies structured reasoning to interpret spatial-temporal data for planning and decision-making.Starting Price: Free -
7
GLM-4.6
Z.ai
GLM-4.6 advances upon its predecessor with stronger reasoning, coding, and agentic capabilities: it demonstrates clear improvements in inferential performance, supports tool use during inference, and more effectively integrates into agent frameworks. In benchmark tests spanning reasoning, coding, and agents, GLM-4.6 outperforms GLM-4.5 and shows competitive strength against models such as DeepSeek-V3.2-Exp and Claude Sonnet 4, though it still trails Claude Sonnet 4.5 in pure coding performance. In real-world tests using an extended “CC-Bench” suite across front-end development, tool building, data analysis, and algorithmic tasks, GLM-4.6 beats GLM-4.5 and approaches parity with Claude Sonnet 4, winning ~48.6% of head-to-head comparisons, while also achieving ~15% better token efficiency. GLM-4.6 is available via the Z.ai API, and developers can integrate it as an LLM backend or agent core using the platform’s API.Starting Price: Free -
8
DeepSeek-V3.2-Exp
DeepSeek
Introducing DeepSeek-V3.2-Exp, our latest experimental model built on V3.1-Terminus, debuting DeepSeek Sparse Attention (DSA) for faster and more efficient inference and training on long contexts. DSA enables fine-grained sparse attention with minimal loss in output quality, boosting performance for long-context tasks while reducing compute costs. Benchmarks indicate that V3.2-Exp performs on par with V3.1-Terminus despite these efficiency gains. The model is now live across app, web, and API. Alongside this, the DeepSeek API prices have been cut by over 50% immediately to make access more affordable. For a transitional period, users can still access V3.1-Terminus via a temporary API endpoint until October 15, 2025. DeepSeek welcomes feedback on DSA via its feedback portal. In conjunction with the release, DeepSeek-V3.2-Exp has been open-sourced: the model weights and supporting technology (including key GPU kernels in TileLang and CUDA) are available on Hugging Face.Starting Price: Free -
9
MiniMax M2
MiniMax
MiniMax M2 is an open source foundation model built specifically for agentic applications and coding workflows, striking a new balance of performance, speed, and cost. It excels in end-to-end development scenarios, handling programming, tool-calling, and complex, long-chain workflows with capabilities such as Python integration, while delivering inference speeds of around 100 tokens per second and offering API pricing at just ~8% of the cost of comparable proprietary models. The model supports “Lightning Mode” for high-speed, lightweight agent tasks, and “Pro Mode” for in-depth full-stack development, report generation, and web-based tool orchestration; its weights are fully open source and available for local deployment with vLLM or SGLang. MiniMax M2 positions itself as a production-ready model that enables agents to complete independent tasks, such as data analysis, programming, tool orchestration, and large-scale multi-step logic at real organizational scale.Starting Price: $0.30 per million input tokens -
10
DeepSeek-V3.2
DeepSeek
DeepSeek-V3.2 is a next-generation open large language model designed for efficient reasoning, complex problem solving, and advanced agentic behavior. It introduces DeepSeek Sparse Attention (DSA), a long-context attention mechanism that dramatically reduces computation while preserving performance. The model is trained with a scalable reinforcement learning framework, allowing it to achieve results competitive with GPT-5 and even surpass it in its Speciale variant. DeepSeek-V3.2 also includes a large-scale agent task synthesis pipeline that generates structured reasoning and tool-use demonstrations for post-training. The model features an updated chat template with new tool-calling logic and the optional developer role for agent workflows. With gold-medal performance in the IMO and IOI 2025 competitions, DeepSeek-V3.2 demonstrates elite reasoning capabilities for both research and applied AI scenarios.Starting Price: Free -
11
DeepSeek-V3.2-Speciale
DeepSeek
DeepSeek-V3.2-Speciale is a high-compute variant of the DeepSeek-V3.2 model, created specifically for deep reasoning and advanced problem-solving tasks. It builds on DeepSeek Sparse Attention (DSA), a custom long-context attention mechanism that reduces computational overhead while preserving high performance. Through a large-scale reinforcement learning framework and extensive post-training compute, the Speciale variant surpasses GPT-5 on reasoning benchmarks and matches the capabilities of Gemini-3.0-Pro. The model achieved gold-medal performance in the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) 2025 and International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) 2025. DeepSeek-V3.2-Speciale does not support tool-calling, making it purely optimized for uninterrupted reasoning and analytical accuracy. Released under the MIT license, it provides researchers and developers an open, state-of-the-art model focused entirely on high-precision reasoning.Starting Price: Free -
12
GLM-4.6V
Z.ai
GLM-4.6V is a state-of-the-art open source multimodal vision-language model from the Z.ai (GLM-V) family designed for reasoning, perception, and action. It ships in two variants: a full-scale version (106B parameters) for cloud or high-performance clusters, and a lightweight “Flash” variant (9B) optimized for local deployment or low-latency use. GLM-4.6V supports a native context window of up to 128K tokens during training, enabling it to process very long documents or multimodal inputs. Crucially, it integrates native Function Calling, meaning the model can take images, screenshots, documents, or other visual media as input directly (without manual text conversion), reason about them, and trigger tool calls, bridging “visual perception” with “executable action.” This enables a wide spectrum of capabilities; interleaved image-and-text content generation (for example, combining document understanding with text summarization or generation of image-annotated responses).Starting Price: Free -
13
GLM-4.1V
Z.ai
GLM-4.1V is a vision-language model, providing a powerful, compact multimodal model designed for reasoning and perception across images, text, and documents. The 9-billion-parameter variant (GLM-4.1V-9B-Thinking) is built on the GLM-4-9B foundation and enhanced through a specialized training paradigm using Reinforcement Learning with Curriculum Sampling (RLCS). It supports a 64k-token context window and accepts high-resolution inputs (up to 4K images, any aspect ratio), enabling it to handle complex tasks such as optical character recognition, image captioning, chart and document parsing, video and scene understanding, GUI-agent workflows (e.g., interpreting screenshots, recognizing UI elements), and general vision-language reasoning. In benchmark evaluations at the 10 B-parameter scale, GLM-4.1V-9B-Thinking achieved top performance on 23 of 28 tasks.Starting Price: Free -
14
GLM-4.5V-Flash
Z.ai
GLM-4.5V-Flash is an open source vision-language model, designed to bring strong multimodal capabilities into a lightweight, deployable package. It supports image, video, document, and GUI inputs, enabling tasks such as scene understanding, chart and document parsing, screen reading, and multi-image analysis. Compared to larger models in the series, GLM-4.5V-Flash offers a compact footprint while retaining core VLM capabilities like visual reasoning, video understanding, GUI task handling, and complex document parsing. It can serve in “GUI agent” workflows, meaning it can interpret screenshots or desktop captures, recognize icons or UI elements, and assist with automated desktop or web-based tasks. Although it forgoes some of the largest-model performance gains, GLM-4.5V-Flash remains versatile for real-world multimodal tasks where efficiency, lower resource usage, and broad modality support are prioritized.Starting Price: Free -
15
GLM-4.5V
Z.ai
GLM-4.5V builds on the GLM-4.5-Air foundation, using a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture with 106 billion total parameters and 12 billion activation parameters. It achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source VLMs of similar scale across 42 public benchmarks, excelling in image, video, document, and GUI-based tasks. It supports a broad range of multimodal capabilities, including image reasoning (scene understanding, spatial recognition, multi-image analysis), video understanding (segmentation, event recognition), complex chart and long-document parsing, GUI-agent workflows (screen reading, icon recognition, desktop automation), and precise visual grounding (e.g., locating objects and returning bounding boxes). GLM-4.5V also introduces a “Thinking Mode” switch, allowing users to choose between fast responses or deeper reasoning when needed.Starting Price: Free -
16
MiMo-V2-Flash
Xiaomi Technology
MiMo-V2-Flash is an open weight large language model developed by Xiaomi based on a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture that blends high performance with inference efficiency. It has 309 billion total parameters but activates only 15 billion active parameters per inference, letting it balance reasoning quality and computational efficiency while supporting extremely long context handling, for tasks like long-document understanding, code generation, and multi-step agent workflows. It incorporates a hybrid attention mechanism that interleaves sliding-window and global attention layers to reduce memory usage and maintain long-range comprehension, and it uses a Multi-Token Prediction (MTP) design that accelerates inference by processing batches of tokens in parallel. MiMo-V2-Flash delivers very fast generation speeds (up to ~150 tokens/second) and is optimized for agentic applications requiring sustained reasoning and multi-turn interactions.Starting Price: Free -
17
Step 3.5 Flash
StepFun
Step 3.5 Flash is an advanced open source foundation language model engineered for frontier reasoning and agentic capabilities with exceptional efficiency, built on a sparse Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture that selectively activates only about 11 billion of its ~196 billion parameters per token to deliver high-density intelligence and real-time responsiveness. Its 3-way Multi-Token Prediction (MTP-3) enables generation throughput in the hundreds of tokens per second for complex multi-step reasoning chains and task execution, and it supports efficient long contexts with a hybrid sliding window attention approach that reduces computational overhead across large datasets or codebases. It demonstrates robust performance on benchmarks for reasoning, coding, and agentic tasks, rivaling or exceeding many larger proprietary models, and includes a scalable reinforcement learning framework for consistent self-improvement.Starting Price: Free -
18
Qwen3.5
Alibaba
Qwen3.5 is a next-generation open-weight multimodal large language model designed to power native vision-language agents. The flagship release, Qwen3.5-397B-A17B, combines a hybrid linear attention architecture with sparse mixture-of-experts, activating only 17 billion parameters per forward pass out of 397 billion total to maximize efficiency. It delivers strong benchmark performance across reasoning, coding, multilingual understanding, visual reasoning, and agent-based tasks. The model expands language support from 119 to 201 languages and dialects while introducing a 1M-token context window in its hosted version, Qwen3.5-Plus. Built for multimodal tasks, it processes text, images, and video with advanced spatial reasoning and tool integration. Qwen3.5 also incorporates scalable reinforcement learning environments to improve general agent capabilities. Designed for developers and enterprises, it enables efficient, tool-augmented, multimodal AI workflows.Starting Price: Free -
19
MiMo-V2-Pro
Xiaomi Technology
Xiaomi MiMo-V2-Pro is a flagship AI foundation model designed to power real-world agentic workflows and complex task execution. It is built to function as the core intelligence behind agent systems, enabling orchestration of multi-step processes and production-level tasks. The model demonstrates strong capabilities in coding, tool usage, and search-based tasks, performing competitively on global benchmarks. With its large-scale architecture and extended context window, it can handle long and complex interactions efficiently. MiMo-V2-Pro is optimized for practical applications, delivering reliable performance across development, automation, and enterprise workflows.Starting Price: $1/million tokens -
20
Qwen3.6-35B-A3B
Alibaba
Qwen3.5-35B-A3B is part of the Qwen3.5 “Medium” model series, designed as a highly efficient, multimodal foundation model that balances strong reasoning ability with practical deployment requirements. It uses a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture with 35 billion total parameters but activates only about 3 billion per token, allowing it to deliver performance comparable to much larger models while significantly reducing computational cost. The model integrates a hybrid attention mechanism that combines linear attention with standard attention layers, enabling efficient long-context processing and improved scalability for complex tasks. As a native vision-language model, it can process both text and visual inputs, supporting use cases such as multimodal reasoning, coding, and agent-based workflows. It is designed to function as a general-purpose “AI agent,” capable of planning, tool use, and structured problem solving rather than just conversational responses.Starting Price: Free -
21
GPT-5.5 Pro
OpenAI
GPT-5.5 Pro is an advanced AI model designed to handle complex, real-world work with greater autonomy and efficiency. It understands user intent quickly and can execute multi-step tasks such as coding, research, data analysis, and document creation with minimal guidance. The model is built to plan, use tools, and refine its outputs until tasks are complete. It excels in knowledge work, software development, and analytical problem-solving. With strong reasoning and persistence, GPT-5.5 Pro can manage long-running workflows across tools and systems. It delivers high-quality results while maintaining speed and efficiency. Overall, it enables individuals and teams to complete demanding tasks faster and more accurately.Starting Price: $30 per 1M tokens (input) -
22
Nemotron 3 Nano Omni
NVIDIA
NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano Omni is an open, omni-modal foundation model designed to unify perception and reasoning across text, images, audio, video, and documents within a single efficient architecture. It eliminates the need for separate models for each modality, reducing inference latency, orchestration complexity, and cost while maintaining consistent cross-modal context. It is purpose-built for agentic AI systems, acting as a perception and context sub-agent that gives larger AI agents the ability to “see, hear, and read” in real time across screens, recordings, and structured or unstructured data. It supports advanced multimodal reasoning tasks such as document understanding, speech recognition, long audio-video analysis, and computer-use workflows, enabling agents to interpret dynamic interfaces and complex environments. Built with a hybrid architecture optimized for long context and throughput, it can process large inputs like multi-page documents.Starting Price: Free -
23
TabFM
Google
TabFM is a zero-shot foundation model for tabular data, designed to simplify classification and regression workflows that traditionally require manual model training, hyperparameter tuning, and domain-specific feature engineering. Built specifically for tables, TabFM reframes tabular prediction as an in-context learning problem: instead of fitting a new supervised model to each dataset, it takes historical training examples and target testing rows together as one unified prompt, then interprets relationships between columns and rows at inference time. Because tables are two-dimensional and orderless, TabFM uses a hybrid architecture that combines alternating row and column attention, row compression, and a dedicated Transformer for in-context learning over compressed row embeddings. This design lets the model capture complex feature interactions and dependencies while keeping prediction computationally efficient for larger datasets.Starting Price: Free -
24
MiMo-V2.6-Pro-UltraSpeed
Xiaomi Technology
MiMo-V2.6-Pro-UltraSpeed is a high-speed serving mode for Xiaomi MiMo’s flagship MiMo-V2.6-Pro model, designed for latency-sensitive AI workloads. It delivers the same underlying model quality as MiMo-V2.6-Pro while providing output speeds of up to 20 times faster. The model supports coding, agentic automation, multimodal reasoning, visual design, research, and other complex tool-using workflows. Its capabilities include software engineering, frontend creation, presentation design, 3D modeling, interactive world generation, computer use, and multimodal analysis. MiMo-V2.6-Pro-UltraSpeed is intended for real-time applications where the capabilities of MiMo-V2.6-Pro are needed with substantially faster generation. It is available through MiMo Desktop and the Xiaomi MiMo API Platform.Starting Price: $4.35 per 1 million tokens inp -
25
GPT-5
OpenAI
GPT-5 is OpenAI’s most advanced AI model, delivering smarter, faster, and more useful responses across a wide range of topics including math, science, finance, and law. It features built-in thinking capabilities that allow it to provide expert-level answers and perform complex reasoning. GPT-5 can handle long context lengths and generate detailed outputs, making it ideal for coding, research, and creative writing. The model includes a ‘verbosity’ parameter for customizable response length and improved personality control. It integrates with business tools like Google Drive and SharePoint to provide context-aware answers while respecting security permissions. Available to everyone, GPT-5 empowers users to collaborate with an AI assistant that feels like a knowledgeable colleague.Starting Price: $1.25 per 1M tokens -
26
Liquid AI
Liquid AI
Our goal at Liquid is to build the most capable AI systems to solve problems at every scale, such that users can build, access, and control their AI solutions. This is to ensure that AI will be meaningfully, reliably, and efficiently integrated at all enterprises. Long term, Liquid will create and deploy frontier-AI-powered solutions that are available to everyone. We build white-box models within a white-box organization. -
27
OpenAI o3
OpenAI
OpenAI o3 is an advanced AI model designed to enhance reasoning capabilities by breaking down complex instructions into smaller, more manageable steps. It offers significant improvements over previous AI iterations, excelling in coding tasks, competitive programming, and achieving high scores in mathematics and science benchmarks. Available for widespread use, OpenAI o3 supports advanced AI-driven problem-solving and decision-making processes. The model incorporates deliberative alignment techniques to ensure its responses align with established safety and ethical guidelines, making it a powerful tool for developers, researchers, and enterprises seeking sophisticated AI solutions.Starting Price: $2 per 1 million tokens -
28
Grok 3 mini
SpaceXAI
Grok-3 Mini, crafted by xAI, is an agile and insightful AI companion tailored for users who need quick, yet thorough answers to their questions. This smaller version maintains the essence of the Grok series, offering an external, often humorous perspective on human affairs with a focus on efficiency. Designed for those on the move or with limited resources, Grok-3 Mini delivers the same level of curiosity and helpfulness in a more compact form. It's adept at handling a broad spectrum of questions, providing succinct insights without compromising on depth or accuracy, making it a perfect tool for fast-paced, modern-day inquiries.Starting Price: Free -
29
DeepSeek R2
DeepSeek
DeepSeek R2 is the anticipated successor to DeepSeek R1, a groundbreaking AI reasoning model launched in January 2025 by the Chinese AI startup DeepSeek. Building on R1’s success, which disrupted the AI industry with its cost-effective performance rivaling top-tier models like OpenAI’s o1, R2 promises a quantum leap in capabilities. It is expected to deliver exceptional speed and human-like reasoning, excelling in complex tasks such as advanced coding and high-level mathematical problem-solving. Leveraging DeepSeek’s innovative Mixture-of-Experts architecture and efficient training methods, R2 aims to outperform its predecessor while maintaining a low computational footprint, potentially expanding its reasoning abilities to languages beyond English.Starting Price: Free -
30
ERNIE 4.5
Baidu
ERNIE 4.5 is a cutting-edge conversational AI platform developed by Baidu, leveraging advanced natural language processing (NLP) models to enable highly sophisticated human-like interactions. The platform is part of Baidu’s ERNIE (Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration) series, which integrates multimodal capabilities, including text, image, and voice. ERNIE 4.5 enhances the ability of AI models to understand complex context and deliver more accurate, nuanced responses, making it suitable for various applications, from customer service and virtual assistants to content creation and enterprise-level automation.Starting Price: $0.55 per 1M tokens
