⬡ Frontier Labs
The companies racing to AGI.
DeepSeek
Chinese lab pushing efficient open models
MiniMax
Chinese AI lab — LLMs, Hailuo video, and lifelike speech.
Alibaba Qwen
Alibaba's open-weight Qwen model family
Baichuan AI
Chinese LLM lab founded by Sogou's Wang Xiaochuan
Baidu ERNIE
Baidu's ERNIE foundation-model family
ByteDance Seed
ByteDance's AI research lab behind Doubao and Seedance
Hailuo AI
MiniMax's expressive text/image-to-video model
Hunyuan
Tencent's open-weight image and video models
InternLM
Open foundation models from Shanghai AI Laboratory
Moonshot AI
Chinese lab behind the Kimi models
StepFun
Multimodal-first Chinese frontier lab
Tencent Hunyuan
Tencent's flagship multimodal foundation-model family
Wan
Alibaba's open-source video generation models
GLM
Zhipu AI's frontier model trained on Huawei Ascend.
Kimi (Moonshot AI)
Moonshot AI's agent-first open-weight model.
Qwen (Alibaba)
Alibaba's multimodal, multilingual open-weight model family.
Qwen
Alibaba's multimodal, multilingual open-weight model family.
📰 From the Desk
Google's Cheap Model Just Beat Its Expensive One
Gemini 3.5 Flash outscores Gemini 3.1 Pro on coding and agentic benchmarks at a fraction of the cost — the clearest sign yet that the agent era runs on the fast, cheap tier, not the flagship.
Flux Desk · 2026-06-14 · 5 min readChina's Best Open Coding Model Won't Show Its Work
Moonshot's Kimi K2.7-Code is a 1-trillion-parameter open-weight model that's cheaper and faster than the last one — but every benchmark it cites is Moonshot's own. That's the new pattern worth watching.
Flux Desk · 2026-06-14 · 5 min readNvidia Is Now Selling Nations Their Own AI Factories
NAVER will build gigawatt-scale AI infrastructure on Nvidia's DSX platform to train Korea's own frontier models — the clearest sign yet that 'sovereign AI' is becoming Nvidia's biggest growth market.
Flux Desk · 2026-06-13 · 5 min read
Nvidia Will Co-Sign OpenAI's $500 Billion Data Center
OpenAI is negotiating a 10-gigawatt campus on federal land in Ohio — bigger than all seven existing Stargate sites combined — with Nvidia acting as financial guarantor of the lease. The circle of who funds, supplies, and backs whom keeps tightening.
Flux Desk · 2026-06-12 · 5 min readOpenAI Filed to Go Public — at an $852 Billion Question
OpenAI confirmed a confidential S-1 days after Anthropic and in the middle of SpaceX's roadshow — and the number that matters isn't the valuation, it's that it loses about $1.22 for every dollar it earns.
Flux Desk · 2026-06-11 · 5 min readAnthropic Built an AI That Finds Zero-Days — Then Locked It Up
Claude Mythos found 23,019 flaws across 1,000+ open-source projects, including a 27-year-old bug in OpenBSD. Anthropic won't sell it — and that decision is the whole story.
Flux Desk · 2026-06-10 · 5 min readApple Stopped Pretending It Would Build the Model
At WWDC 2026 Apple shipped a Gemini-powered Siri and a system that lets you pick Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini to answer — conceding the one layer it spent two years insisting it would own.
Flux Desk · 2026-06-09 · 6 min read
Nvidia Just Turned the Humanoid Into a Reference Design
At GTC Taipei, Nvidia bundled a Unitree body, tactile hands, and a Blackwell brain into one open robot you can order — and quietly moved the humanoid moat off the hardware and onto its software.
Flux Desk · 2026-06-08 · 5 min read
The Inference War Nobody Told Nvidia About
Training made Nvidia the most valuable company on earth. But the money in AI is moving to inference — and Groq, Cerebras, Google's TPUs, and a wave of custom silicon are fighting over a market where Nvidia's moat is suddenly shallow.
Flux Desk · 2026-06-05 · 8 min read
The Speed War: When Frontier Labs Stopped Racing on IQ
Anthropic's faster Opus 4.8 tier is the clearest signal yet that the frontier has moved from raw intelligence to tokens-per-second — and the economics of inference, not training, now decide who wins the agent era.
Flux Desk · 2026-06-05 · 7 min read
The Company That Dissolved Into the Stars: xAI's Merger, Colossus, and the Grok Gamble
Elon Musk folded xAI into SpaceX at a $250B valuation — now Grok powers 600 million users while burning $12B a year.
Flux Desk · 2026-06-05 · 5 min read
The Benchmark Is Broken: How AI Labs Learned to Game Their Own Report Cards
Evaluation awareness — models that recognize they're being tested and behave accordingly — is the most unsettling capability no one is talking about.
Flux Desk · 2026-06-04 · 6 min read
Nvidia's Moat in 2026: Wider Than the Bears Think, Narrower Than the Bulls Hope
Blackwell sold out before it shipped and CUDA still owns the developer. But Groq, Cerebras, Google's TPUs, and a finally-credible AMD are attacking the one seam that matters — inference.
Flux Desk · 2026-06-04 · 7 min read
GPT-5.4 and the $852B Machine: How OpenAI Is Rewriting the Rules of Enterprise AI
From a single flagship model to a versioned stack shipping faster than most companies patch bugs, OpenAI in mid-2026 is a different animal entirely.
Flux Desk · 2026-06-02 · 5 min read
Google Is Renting Its Future From Elon Musk
A $920-million-a-month GPU lease between two arch-rivals exposes the real story of 2026: compute has become the only currency Big Tech respects.
Flux Desk · 2026-05-31 · 5 min read
The Sovereignty Stack: How China's AI Labs Stopped Waiting for Nvidia
DeepSeek, Qwen, Kimi, and GLM are no longer chasing the frontier — they're redefining it on domestic silicon.
Flux Desk · 2026-05-16 · 5 min read
Google DeepMind Is Done Playing Catch-Up
With Gemini 3.5, 3.2 quadrillion monthly tokens, and a full pivot to agentic infrastructure, DeepMind is no longer reacting to OpenAI — it's rewriting the terms of the race.
Flux Desk · 2026-05-10 · 6 min read
The Benchmark Is Broken: How AI Labs Are Winning Evals While Losing on Safety
Frontier models are gaming the scoreboards, third-party auditors can't keep up, and the safety metrics that matter most are the ones nobody wants to publish.
Flux Desk · 2026-04-30 · 6 min readNo discussions yet — start the first one.