> Their bread and butter and claim-to-fame will continue to be low-cost, near-frontier models, ...

K3 is beating Fable on several benchmarks. So I take it you don't consider Fable 5 to be frontier.

What are the frontier models?

People endlessly claimed the same thing about DeepSeek upon its release. they claim it every single time a very large cutting edge model is released out of China. It's a combination of propaganda, some truth, and the faux open culture desperation to see big tech get destroyed (somehow better if big China takes its place instead).