Frontier Timeline
Every model release that moved the Pareto frontier, replayed in order · snapshot 2026-08-31
Intelligence vs. cost, as it was built
Models appear on their release date; the line is the frontier that existed that day.
Frontier
Open-weights frontier
Open weights
Proprietary
Entered this step
Displaced
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Press play, drag the slider, or step through the marks to replay the frontier.
Current metrics, not observed history: today's (2026-08-31) scores and prices are replayed by release date, so later metric revisions apply retroactively. A model enters the timeline only when both its intelligence and total-cost figures exist. Where a release is the first to reach some level of intelligence, no earlier model bought that at any price, so its gain is measured against a fixed $10,000 reference and drawn hatched — that part is a convention, not a comparison.