🤖 ModelBytes Digest
Wednesday, September 23, 2026

This week's pattern is tiered expansion: labs are filling out product lines below their flagships with cost-optimized variants, while DeepSeek ships a genuinely new base model under a point-release name.

━━━ OPEN FRONTIER 🔓
DeepSeek V4.1 Flash — A brand-new base model wearing a point-release number, not a fine-tune of V4. Released Sep 10. ⚡ API live · OpenRouter. → Source

━━━ CLOSED FRONTIER 🔒
Claude Opus 5.5 — Anthropic's flagship for demanding reasoning, coding, and long-horizon agentic work, succeeding Opus 5. 1.0M context, $4.00/$20.00 per 1M. ⚡ API live · OpenRouter. → Source

GPT-6 Sol — Cost-efficient high-end tier in the GPT-6 series, positioned below Astra and above Luna. 1.1M context, $2.00/$10.00 per 1M. ⚡ API live · OpenRouter. → Source

GPT-6 Luna — Fast, cost-efficient GPT-6 tier for high-volume and latency-sensitive workloads. 1.1M context, $0.10/$0.50 per 1M. ⚡ API live · OpenRouter. → Source

Command A+ — Cohere's flagship for enterprise agentic workflows with native tool calling and strict schemas. 192K context, $0.30/$1.50 per 1M. ⚡ API live · OpenRouter. → Source

━━━ SPECIALIZED 🎯
Aion 3.5 — Multi-model roleplaying and storytelling system built on GLM, using collaborative generation across specialized models. 262K context, $3.00/$6.00 per 1M. ⚡ API live · OpenRouter. → Source

Rho-RoboEval — Microsoft's 5.2B model for robotics evaluation. MIT license. 📦 Open weights · HF. → Source

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🤖 ModelBytes Digest
Thursday, September 24, 2026

Robotics gets its own foundation-model moment while API providers ship throughput variants of existing frontier models.

━━━ SPECIALIZED 🎯
Flux 3 Action SO101 — Black Forest Labs' first robotics action model, targeting single-object manipulation with a 6.9B-parameter architecture. Released Sep 22 · 6.9B params. 📦 Open weights · HF. → Source

Flux 3 Action Droid — Companion robotics model for broader manipulation tasks, same 6.9B footprint as SO101. Released Sep 22 · 6.9B params. 📦 Open weights · HF. → Source

Flux 3 Action Base — Base robotics model from Black Forest Labs, parameter count undisclosed but positioned as the foundation for task-specific variants. Released Sep 22. 📦 Open weights · HF. → Source

━━━ CLOSED FRONTIER 🔒
GLM 5.3 Prime — High-throughput variant of GLM-5.3 with 1.5–2× faster output via inference acceleration, same 1M context. Released Sep 23 · 1M context · $2.80/$8.80 per 1M. ⚡ API live · OpenRouter. → Source

Qwen3.8 Max Prime — Higher-throughput SKU of Qwen3.8 Max accepting text, image, and video at a premium price point. Released Sep 23 · 1M context · $4.00/$12.00 per 1M. ⚡ API live · OpenRouter. → Source

Ember 1 — Fireworks Research's specialized reasoning model built on Kimi K3, with 1M context and $3/$15 pricing. Released Sep 24 · 1M context · $3.00/$15.00 per 1M. ⚡ API live · OpenRouter. → Source

Space Bunny Alpha — Anonymous large model with fast inference, strong coding, and native multimodal input — currently free. Released Sep 23 · 1M context · FREE. ⚡ API live · OpenRouter. → Source

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🤖 ModelBytes Digest
Friday, September 25, 2026

Today's pattern: frontier labs keep cutting prices on SOTA models while open-weight RL and ASR variants ship same-week.

━━━ OPEN FRONTIER 🔓
MiMo V2.6 Pro RL — RL-tuned follow-up to MiMo V2.6 Pro; reasoning-focused RL on the 1024B backbone for builders needing stronger agentic outputs. Released Sep 25 · 1024.2B total params · MIT. 📦 Open weights · HF. → Source

━━━ SPECIALIZED 🎯
Audio8 ASR Infinite — 4.1B streaming ASR for infinite-length audio; Apache-2.0 makes it embeddable without licensing friction. Released Sep 25 · 4.1B total params · Apache-2.0. 📦 Open weights · HF. → Source

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🤖 ModelBytes Digest
Saturday, September 26, 2026

Today's releases push builders toward multimodal decision-making at the edge: open 0.8B–4B image-text models for cheap visual decisions, plus a closed embodied-reasoning API for physical agents.

━━━ SPECIALIZED 🎯
Intern Decision 4B — Apache-2.0 image-text-to-text model for visual decision tasks; 4B params. Released Sep 26 · Apache-2.0 · 4B params. 📦 Open weights · HF. → Source

Intern Decision 2B — Apache-2.0 image-text-to-text model for visual decision tasks; 2B params. Released Sep 26 · Apache-2.0 · 2B params. 📦 Open weights · HF. → Source

Intern Decision 0.8B — Apache-2.0 image-text-to-text model for visual decision tasks; 0.8B params. Released Sep 26 · Apache-2.0 · 0.8B params. 📦 Open weights · HF. → Source

Perceptron Mk1.5 — Embodied reasoning model for physical agents; accepts text, image, video, audio and returns text plus structured annotations. Released Sep 25 · 37k context · Closed/API · $0.15/$1.50 per 1M. ⚡ API live · OpenRouter. → Source

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🤖 ModelBytes Digest
Sunday, September 27, 2026

Today's only fresh release is a 144M CPU decision model, a counterweight to frontier scale for builders who need on-device inference.

━━━ LOCAL 🏠
Julia 1 — A 144.3M-param open-weight model built to run decision workloads on CPU, not GPU clusters. Released Sep 26 · 144.3M params · open weights. → Source

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🤖 ModelBytes Digest
Monday, September 28, 2026

Today's pattern is open multimodal and RL-tuned weights landing alongside a managed Grok, which means builders get cheaper local options for vision/OCR and a high-capacity API fallback in the same week.

━━━ OPEN FRONTIER 🔓
Holo4 27B — Open image-text-to-text generalist for non-commercial multimodal work. 27B total · CC BY-NC 4.0 · Released Sep 24. 📦 Open weights · HF. → Source

Holo4 35B A3B — Apache-licensed sibling with 35B total params for commercial multimodal use. 35B total · Apache-2.0 · Released Sep 24. 📦 Open weights · HF. → Source

MiMo V2.6 Flash RL — RL-tuned text-generation variant of MiMo V2.6 Flash. 310.8B total · MIT · Released Sep 28. 📦 Open weights · HF. → Source

━━━ CLOSED FRONTIER 🔒
Grok 4.6 — High-capability xAI model now available as a managed model on Google Cloud's Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform. ⚡ API live · Google Cloud. → Source

━━━ SPECIALIZED 🎯
TeleOCR — Small 1.4B OCR specialist for extracting text from images. 1.4B total · Apache-2.0 · Released Sep 28. 📦 Open weights · HF. → Source

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🤖 ModelBytes Digest
Tuesday, September 29, 2026

Closed labs shipped point upgrades while open tooling added a 36B math verifier — builders get cheaper Sonnet-class API work and a new eval checker in the same window.

━━━ CLOSED FRONTIER 🔒
Claude Sonnet 5.5 — Anthropic's Sonnet-class upgrade for well-scoped everyday work, direct successor to Sonnet 5. 1M context, closed API, $2/$10 per 1M. Released Sep 28. ⚡ API live · OpenRouter. → Source
Astra — Gemini's September update, appearing in the latest cross-lab IQ comparison. → Source
Fable 5.1 — Anthropic's Fable line point release, shipping alongside Sonnet 5.5. → Source
Flash — Gemini Flash update, the lighter model in the September comparison. → Source

━━━ SPECIALIZED 🎯
AdvancedMathBench AutoVerifier — 36B image-text-to-text model built to auto-verify math benchmark solutions. 36B params. Released Sep 29. 📦 Open weights · HF. → Source

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🤖 ModelBytes Digest
Wednesday, September 30, 2026

Today's releases split between incremental closed upgrades and open multimodal weights, while OpenAI's shelved GPT-6.1 Astra signals safety gates tightening at the top.

━━━ OPEN FRONTIER 🔓
AREX 2 — BAAI's 27.4B image-text-to-text model under Apache 2.0, a general multimodal with open weights for builders who need vision-language without a closed API. Released Sep 29 · 27.4B params · Apache 2.0. 📦 Open weights · HF. → Source

━━━ CLOSED FRONTIER 🔒
GPT-6.1 Sol — Upgrade to GPT-6 Sol, positioned below Astra, aimed at agentic coding, computer use, and document-heavy professional work; Pro variant sets reasoning.mode=pro for higher-quality complex tasks. Released Sep 29 · 1.1M context · $2.00/$10.00 per 1M. ⚡ API live · OpenRouter. → Source

━━━ SPECIALIZED 🎯
Mercury Voice — Inception's voice model, confirmed Sep 29, for audio/voice tasks. Released Sep 29. → Source

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🤖 ModelBytes Digest
Thursday, October 01, 2026

━━━ CLOSED FRONTIER 🔒
Pareto 26.10 Preview — Multimodal composite built for research, coding, and agentic workflows with a 1M-token context window. Closed API, $0.80/$3.20 per 1M tokens. Released Oct 1. ⚡ API live · OpenRouter. → Source

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🤖 ModelBytes Digest
Friday, October 02, 2026

Today's releases split between flagship frontier rollouts and smaller open/API utility models, with safety concerns pulling one major launch while builders get a free 560B MoE and an Apache-licensed multimodal.

━━━ CLOSED FRONTIER 🔒
Gemini 4 Argon — Google's flagship model tops Arena text at 1524.8 with a 15% hallucination rate, but rollout is just beginning. Released Sep 30. → Source

GPT-6 Luna Pro — OpenAI's Pro tier adds a 1,050,000-token context window at $0.10 input / $0.50 output per million tokens. Released Sep 30. ⚡ API live · OpenRouter. → Source

Ling 3.1 Flash — Free hybrid reasoning MoE with 25B active of 560B total and 262k context, aimed at cost-sensitive agent workloads. Released Oct 2. License Closed/API. ⚡ API live · OpenRouter. → Source

━━━ SPECIALIZED 🎯
Clef — Apache-licensed 27.4B image-text-to-text model, useful for builders needing a self-hostable multimodal base. Released Oct 2. License Apache-2.0. 📦 Open weights · HF. → Source

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🤖 ModelBytes Digest
Saturday, October 03, 2026

Today's new models are small open multimodal/vision releases, not frontier — useful for local prototyping but not a step change.

━━━ OPEN FRONTIER 🔓
Clef Flash — 9.4B open image-text-to-text model under Apache 2.0, small enough to run locally while handling multimodal input. Released Oct 3 · 9.4B params · Apache 2.0. 📦 Open weights · HF. → Source

━━━ SPECIALIZED 🎯
VisionHOPE — MIT-licensed image classification model, no parameter count published. Released Oct 3 · MIT. 📦 Open weights · HF. → Source

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🤖 ModelBytes Digest
Sunday, October 04, 2026

October opens without a frontier launch; the day's models are small and specialised — a sovereign German MoE and a Gemma-based diarization model.

━━━ OPEN FRONTIER 🔓
Kolibri 1 — Open-weight German-English MoE built for sovereign, regulated EU deployments rather than raw scale. MoE, open weights, German/English. Released Oct 3. 📦 Open weights. → Source

━━━ SPECIALIZED 🎯
DiarizationLM Gemma 4 E4B — Speaker diarization model on Gemma 4 E4B, Apache-2.0, 8B total params. 8B params, Apache-2.0. Released Oct 4. 📦 Open weights · HF. → Source

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🤖 ModelBytes Digest
Monday, October 05, 2026

Open Apache-2.0 weights carried the day, and with dedicated deciders landing at both 2B and 26B, agent judgment is splitting off into its own model class — routing calls no longer need to burn frontier tokens.

━━━ OPEN FRONTIER 🔓
JEV 27B VL — A mid-size vision-language model for builders who need image understanding inside an open stack, with no API dependency. 27B total params · Apache-2.0 · Released Oct 3. 📦 Open weights · HF. → Source

OrcaSAQ-2 27B — OrcaRouter's second SAQ generation ships as a general-purpose text generator straight to open weights. 27B total params · Apache-2.0 · Released Oct 2. 📦 Open weights · HF. → Source

━━━ SPECIALIZED 🎯
GEV 26B Decide — A decision specialist that classifies instead of generating — judgment calls without a full LLM pass. 26B total params · Apache-2.0 · Decision Index suite 0.2 (edition 0.2.1): 62.48 · Released Oct 3. 📦 Open weights · HF. → Source

━━━ LOCAL 🏠
Strands Decider 2B — An agent decider shrunk to 2B so routing calls run on your own hardware, not a metered API. 2B total params · Apache-2.0 · JevBench public 0.7229 · boardgame 0.822 · contractnli 0.872 · Released Oct 1. 📦 Open weights · HF. → Source

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🤖 ModelBytes Digest
Tuesday, October 06, 2026

Mistral Large 4 is the day's only frontier drop — everything else new is open-weight and narrow, so the practical move is wiring a cheap 512K-context API into your agent loop while picking up domain weights for video, ASR, and vision.

━━━ OPEN FRONTIER 🔓
Mistral Large 4 — Frontier-class reasoning, coding, and agentic work at $0.68/$2.09 per 1M tokens, with a 512K window that swallows whole repos. 524K context · multimodal (text + image input) · Released Oct 6. ⚡ API live · OpenRouter → Source

Holotron4 30B A3B — Sparse image-text-to-text model sized to fit a single node while still taking visual input. 30B total params · Released Sep 28. 📦 Open weights · HF → Source

ALoDLM 8B — Amazon's text generator, but cc-by-nc-4.0 keeps it out of commercial pipelines. 8B params · cc-by-nc-4.0 · Released Oct 2. 📦 Open weights · HF → Source

━━━ SPECIALIZED 🎯
LTX 2.5 — Lightricks' image-to-video successor, aimed at turning stills into motion without a render farm. Released Oct 2. 📦 Open weights · HF → Source

Cosmos-H Surgical Simulator — NVIDIA's image-to-video model built specifically for surgical simulation footage. Released Oct 6. 📦 Open weights · HF → Source

PixelUMM — NVIDIA's pixel-level image-to-text model for vision tasks that need spatial grounding, not just captions. Released Oct 1. 📦 Open weights · HF → Source

Phonon 2 — Permissively licensed ASR you can ship in a product without a legal review. cc-by-4.0 · Released Oct 1. 📦 Open weights · HF → Source

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🤖 ModelBytes Digest
Wednesday, October 07, 2026

This cycle's releases are all narrow-purpose — image editing, speech, classification, and weather downscaling — rather than general chat models.

━━━ CLOSED FRONTIER 🔒

Gemini Nano Banana 2.1 — Google's image tier now handles product recontextualization better, which matters if you generate catalog or ad imagery where the object has to sit convincingly in a new scene. 66K context · $1.50/$7.50 per 1M · Released Oct 6. ⚡ API live · OpenRouter. → OpenRouter

━━━ ALSO TRACKED

Cohere Transcribe 03-2026 — Cohere's speech recognition entry gives builders a self-hostable transcription model to drop into their own audio pipeline instead of renting one per minute. 2.1B total · Apache-2.0 · Released Oct 7. 📦 Open weights · HF. → HF

PPLX Decider v1.1 27B — Perplexity's decider is built for routing and classification calls, so it can sit in front of a larger model as a gate that decides what actually gets sent downstream. 27B total · Apache-2.0 · Released Oct 5. 📦 Open weights · HF. → HF

NVIDIA CorrDiff Cosmo ERA5 — NVIDIA's CorrDiff line lands on Hugging Face for teams doing atmospheric downscaling work who want the model weights in their own pipeline. openmdw-1.1 · Released Oct 7. 📦 Open weights · HF. → HF

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🤖 ModelBytes Digest
Thursday, October 08, 2026

Small multimodal models from LiquidAI and interfaze-ai land alongside new closed agentic endpoints from Anthropic and StepFun.

━━━ CLOSED FRONTIER 🔒
Claude Haiku 5.5 — Built for high-volume summarization, subagents, and browser automation where throughput matters more than peak reasoning. 1.0M context · $0.10/$0.50 per 1M · Released Oct 7. ⚡ API live · OpenRouter. → OpenRouter

━━━ SPECIALIZED 🎯
Step 5 Preview — A flagship agentic model aimed at long-horizon tool use and multi-step workflows. 1.0M context · $1.00/$2.70 per 1M · Released Oct 8. ⚡ API live · OpenRouter. → OpenRouter

d1-omni 600M — A compact image-text model for local multimodal understanding on constrained hardware. 600M total · Released Oct 7. 📦 Open weights · HF. → HF

d1-3B — A small multimodal model for local deployment and quick experimentation. 3B total · Released Oct 7. 📦 Open weights · HF. → HF

Interfaze 1 Lite — An image-to-image model for lightweight visual editing and generation pipelines. Released Oct 7. 📦 Open weights · HF. → HF

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🤖 ModelBytes Digest
Friday, October 09, 2026

Two text-to-image releases and a document parser land in the same window, so open multimodal tooling keeps widening.

━━━ OPEN FRONTIER 🔓
Qwen-Image 2.1 Turbo — A faster cut of the Qwen image line for builders who want generation latency down without leaving the Qwen ecosystem. 7.1B total · Released Oct 9. 📦 Open weights · HF. → HF

━━━ SPECIALIZED 🎯
Youtu-Parsing-Omni — Converts document images straight into structured text, so parsing can live inside a multimodal pipeline instead of a separate OCR stack. 5.3B total · Released Oct 9. 📦 Open weights · HF. → HF

Iris 3B — Small enough to run on your own hardware for asset generation when you would rather not call a hosted image API. 3B total · Apache-2.0 · Released Oct 8. 📦 Open weights · HF. → HF

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🤖 ModelBytes Digest
Saturday, October 10, 2026

Mistral's two Arabic releases split the job — streaming speech recognition on one side, language identification on the other.

━━━ OPEN FRONTIER 🔓
Voxtral Mini 4B Realtime Arabic — Gives Arabic voice agents a streaming transcription path instead of forcing batch audio uploads through a hosted API. 4B total · Released Oct 9. 📦 Open weights · HF. → HF

LIDstral Arabic — A small classifier for tagging Arabic text before it reaches a larger model, useful for routing and filtering pipelines. Apache-2.0 · Released Oct 9. 📦 Open weights · HF. → HF

━━━ SPECIALIZED 🎯
Strands Decider 26B A4B — A heavier decider for agent stacks whose routing calls have outgrown what the small variant can resolve. 26B total · Apache-2.0 · Released Oct 9. 📦 Open weights · HF. → HF

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🤖 ModelBytes Digest
Sunday, October 11, 2026

━━━ CLOSED FRONTIER 🔒
GPT-6.1 Sol — Sol is the model Asana's browser agent runs on, making it the current reference point for teams wiring web-automation agents into OpenAI's stack. Released Oct 9. 🔗 Cited source. → openai.com

━━━ SPECIALIZED 🎯
LightOnOCR 3 0.8B — An image-to-text OCR model you can host yourself, so document extraction pipelines stop round-tripping every page through a hosted vision API. 0.8B total · Apache-2.0 · Released Oct 9. 📦 Open weights · HF. → HF

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🤖 ModelBytes Digest
Monday, October 12, 2026

This cycle's releases are task-specific — video generation, classification, and compact multimodal — not general chat flagships.

━━━ SPECIALIZED 🎯
Multics — Multics generates video from a still image, giving builders a self-hostable path to animating product shots, storyboards, or ad creative. Apache-2.0 · Released Oct 12. 📦 Open weights · HF. → HF

JEV 35B — JEV 35B targets classification and decision tasks, so it can gate or route traffic without paying for a full chat model. 35B total · Apache-2.0 · Released Oct 11. 📦 Open weights · HF. → HF

H2O Lightning 4B — H2O Lightning 4B takes image-text input in a footprint small enough to co-locate with other services on one machine. 4B total · Apache-2.0 · Released Oct 12. 📦 Open weights · HF. → HF

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🤖 ModelBytes Digest
Tuesday, October 13, 2026

Gemini 4 Argon arrives as both a general frontier model and a robotics-tuned variant, so one release covers agentic and embodied work.

━━━ OPEN FRONTIER 🔓
MiniCPM-V 4.7 35B A3B — Extending the MiniCPM-V line upward gives builders a heavier vision-language option for image and document understanding inside their own stack. 35B total · Apache-2.0 · Released Oct 13. 📦 Open weights · HF. → HF

MiniCPM-V 4.7 1B — The small end of the same release targets on-device and edge vision work where a hosted call is not an option. 1B total · Apache-2.0 · Released Oct 13. 📦 Open weights · HF. → HF

━━━ SPECIALIZED 🎯
Gemini 4 Argon — The newest flagship reasoning tier, aimed at the hardest multi-step problems and long-horizon agentic tasks. Released Oct 13. 🔗 Cited source. → deepmind.google

Muse Wonder — A frontier reasoning model built for agentic personal and professional work, taking text, images, video, audio, and PDFs through one endpoint. 1.0M context · $4.00/$20.00 per 1M · Released Oct 12. ⚡ API live · OpenRouter. → OpenRouter

Gemini 4 Argon for Robotics — A robotics-tuned cut of the same release, so embodied and manipulation stacks can target the new generation without waiting on a separate model. Released Oct 13. 🔗 Cited source. → deepmind.google

ScaleDown Summarize — Abstractive summarization as an endpoint, for when you need a faithful rewrite of long documents rather than lifted sentences. 1.0M context · $0.04/$0.00 per 1M · Released Oct 13. ⚡ API live · OpenRouter. → OpenRouter

ScaleDown Extract — Description-driven entity extraction that lets you define output fields in plain English instead of maintaining a fixed schema. 1.0M context · $0.04/$0.00 per 1M · Released Oct 13. ⚡ API live · OpenRouter. → OpenRouter

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