Best Free Foundation Models - Page 3
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Compare the Top Free Foundation Models as of August 2026 - Page 3
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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
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 -
3
GLM-4.6
Zhipu 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 -
4
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 -
5
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 -
6
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 -
7
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 -
8
GLM-4.6V
Zhipu 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 -
9
GLM-4.1V
Zhipu 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 -
10
GLM-4.5V-Flash
Zhipu 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 -
11
GLM-4.5V
Zhipu 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 -
12
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 -
13
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 -
14
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 -
15
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 -
16
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 -
17
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 -
18
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. -
19
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 -
20
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 -
21
GPT-5.1
OpenAI
GPT-5.1 is the latest update in the GPT-5 series, designed to make ChatGPT dramatically smarter and more conversational. The release introduces two distinct model variants: GPT-5.1 Instant, which is described as the most-used model and is now warmer, better at following instructions, and more intelligent; and GPT-5.1 Thinking, which is the advanced reasoning engine that’s been tuned to be easier to understand, faster on straightforward tasks, and more persistent on complex ones. Users' queries are now routed automatically to the variant best-suited to the task. The update emphasizes not just improved raw intelligence but also enhanced communication style; the models are tuned to be more natural, enjoyable to talk to, and better aligned with user intents. The system card addendum notes that GPT-5.1 Instant uses “adaptive reasoning” that lets it decide when to think more deeply before responding, while GPT-5.1 Thinking adapts its thinking time accurately to the question at hand. -
22
GPT-5.2 Thinking
OpenAI
GPT-5.2 Thinking is the highest-capability configuration in OpenAI’s GPT-5.2 model family, engineered for deep, expert-level reasoning, complex task execution, and advanced problem solving across long contexts and professional domains. Built on the foundational GPT-5.2 architecture with improvements in grounding, stability, and reasoning quality, this variant applies more compute and reasoning effort to generate responses that are more accurate, structured, and contextually rich when handling highly intricate workflows, multi-step analysis, and domain-specific challenges. GPT-5.2 Thinking excels at tasks that require sustained logical coherence, such as detailed research synthesis, advanced coding and debugging, complex data interpretation, strategic planning, and sophisticated technical writing, and it outperforms lighter variants on benchmarks that test professional skills and deep comprehension. -
23
GPT-5.2 Instant
OpenAI
GPT-5.2 Instant is the fast, capable variant of OpenAI’s GPT-5.2 model family designed for everyday work and learning with clear improvements in information-seeking questions, how-tos and walkthroughs, technical writing, and translation compared to prior versions. It builds on the warmer conversational tone introduced in GPT-5.1 Instant and produces clearer explanations that surface key information upfront, making it easier for users to get concise, accurate answers quickly. GPT-5.2 Instant delivers speed and responsiveness for typical tasks like answering queries, generating summaries, assisting with research, and helping with writing and editing, while incorporating broader enhancements from the GPT-5.2 series in reasoning, long-context handling, and factual grounding. As part of the GPT-5.2 lineup, it shares the same foundational improvements that boost overall reliability and performance across a wide range of everyday activities. -
24
GPT-5.2 Pro
OpenAI
GPT-5.2 Pro is the highest-capability variant of OpenAI’s latest GPT-5.2 model family, built to deliver professional-grade reasoning, complex task performance, and enhanced accuracy for demanding knowledge work, creative problem-solving, and enterprise-level applications. It builds on the foundational improvements of GPT-5.2, including stronger general intelligence, superior long-context understanding, better factual grounding, and improved tool use, while using more compute and deeper processing to produce more thoughtful, reliable, and context-rich responses for users with intricate, multi-step requirements. GPT-5.2 Pro is designed to handle challenging workflows such as advanced coding and debugging, deep data analysis, research synthesis, extensive document comprehension, and complex project planning with greater precision and fewer errors than lighter variants. -
25
Qwen3.6
Alibaba
Qwen3.6 is a large language model developed by Alibaba as part of its Qwen AI model family, designed for real-world applications and advanced reasoning tasks. It focuses on improving stability, usability, and performance compared to earlier versions. The model supports multimodal capabilities, allowing it to process and reason across text, images, and other data types. Qwen3.6 is particularly strong in coding and developer workflows, offering improved accuracy for complex programming tasks. It uses a mixture-of-experts architecture, enabling efficient performance while maintaining large-scale model capabilities. The model is designed to be deployable in production environments, including enterprise and cloud-based systems. It can be integrated into applications or run locally using open-weight variants. Overall, Qwen3.6 delivers a powerful, efficient, and versatile AI solution for modern use cases.Starting Price: Free -
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Grok 4.6
SpaceXAI
Grok 4.6 is an upcoming AI model from xAI with 2 trillion parameters expected to continue the Grok model family’s focus on advanced reasoning, coding, agentic workflows, and knowledge work. While xAI has not yet published a full official product page for Grok 4.6, public reporting indicates that Elon Musk confirmed the model is in development. Grok 4.6 is likely to build on the capabilities introduced in Grok 4.5, which xAI describes as its smartest model for coding, agentic tasks, and knowledge work. The broader Grok platform supports chat, coding, image creation, real-time answers from the web and X, and API access for developers. For businesses and builders, Grok 4.6 may become relevant for software engineering, research, automation, AI agents, and productivity workflows once details are released. Built for users who want access to xAI’s newest frontier models, Grok 4.6 represents the next expected step in the company’s fast-moving AI roadmap. -
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Grok 4.7
SpaceXAI
Grok 4.7 is an upcoming xAI model expected to continue the Grok 4.x family’s focus on coding, reasoning, agentic workflows, and knowledge work. While xAI has not yet published an official Grok 4.7 launch page, model card, API slug, pricing, or benchmark report, the model is positioned as a future step beyond currently documented Grok 4-era releases. Grok 4.7 will likely build on xAI’s recent work around software engineering, tool use, long-context reasoning, multimodal capabilities, and real-time AI assistance. Developers and AI teams should treat Grok 4.7 as an upcoming model rather than a generally available product until xAI releases official documentation. Once available, it may be relevant for coding agents, research workflows, automation, technical support, and enterprise AI applications. Built for developers and power users tracking xAI’s roadmap, Grok 4.7 represents a likely next-stage model for advanced reasoning and agentic productivity. -
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Smaug-72B
Abacus
Smaug-72B is a powerful open-source large language model (LLM) known for several key features: High Performance: It currently holds the top spot on the Hugging Face Open LLM leaderboard, surpassing models like GPT-3.5 in various benchmarks. This means it excels at tasks like understanding, responding to, and generating human-like text. Open Source: Unlike many other advanced LLMs, Smaug-72B is freely available for anyone to use and modify, fostering collaboration and innovation in the AI community. Focus on Reasoning and Math: It specifically shines in handling reasoning and mathematical tasks, attributing this strength to unique fine-tuning techniques developed by Abacus AI, the creators of Smaug-72B. Based on Qwen-72B: It's technically a fine-tuned version of another powerful LLM called Qwen-72B, released by Alibaba, further improving upon its capabilities. Overall, Smaug-72B represents a significant step forward in open-source AI.Starting Price: Free