How many frontier labs are there right now? There's 5 independent groups neck-and-neck on the benchmarks, right?

A few weeks ago it was 2. Argon happened 23 days ago; Muse Wonder was 11 days ago.

Moonshot has been frontier since this summer. At this point whenever they release a model it's on par with whatever the latest OpenAI/Anthropic model release was.

Not sure I'd put Google there in practice. And while Muse is an impressive jump from behind it's still not quite at the frontier either IMO.

You either include all labs which can reasonably produce models which are capable enough to be considered generally on-par with the best available models, in which case there has been way more than 2 frontier labs for a while now, or you take a more literal definition and only include labs which are capable of producing models which are considered "the best" out there, in which case there are basically just 2.

I think the former definition is a bit more meaningful since it avoids issues with determining what actually constitutes "the best" model out there. In that case, Google has been a frontier lab for a long time, Meta arguably as well, and you're also ignoring xAI which has been competitive for a while now. And, obviously, there's a bunch of Chinese labs which would deserve the title as well.

But if one is being strict (and willing to accept generally accepted definitions/measures/etc.), then there has only ever been two frontier labs: OpenAI and Anthropic. They're the only labs to have had "the best" models at any point in time since LLMs became a thing.

right now it looks like only anthropic since openai made the staggering business decision to release their midrange model (terra) rebranded as sol 6.1 and quantized astra into the ground.

everyone else mostly seems to have just decided to cheat on benchmarks to make their models look better than they actually are, and none seem to want to actually try to make better models.

It's still just 2. Google hasn't been at the top in a long while, and even when it was, it was just a tiny improvement over what other labs had previously released. Meta has never been at the top. Only two labs release LLMs that really push the limits out.

Muse Wonder is good but it's not frontier. It goes neck and neck with Opus 5.

> How many frontier labs are there right now?

As long as LLM's can be distilled, and all these "labs" (what a weird name) can distill one another, there are going to be as many as capital is available to be burnt on the topic.

I'm not sure what counts anymore. You've got OpenAI and Anthropic; then Meta, Google, and X; then over to Alibaba/Qwen, Z/GLM, Moonshot/Kimi, Deepseek; and Mistral in Europe. How many people out there in the real world can actually come up with tasks that differentiate those 10?