Meta's first frontier models, Muse Wonder and Muse Wonder Full, launched October 12. Wonder Full posts the headline benchmark wins, but it's only available inside Meta's $50-$200/month Muse Code app. Developers get the weaker Wonder. And the company that made open models mainstream released no weights at all.
Reflection AI announced Beam, a 501-billion-parameter open-weight model for coding and agents. Its own benchmark table shows DeepSeek V4.1 Flash ahead on most shared tests. Beam's real pitch is efficiency, and the weights aren't out yet.
Gemini 4 Argon launched September 30 at $2 per million input tokens against GPT-6 Astra's $10 — and is available only to vetted cyber defenders. The same week OpenAI shipped always-on agents on a model a government institute flagged. Google withheld a model that ties it on cyber. That is the costly-signal test, passed.
Claude Opus 5 approaches Fable 5 intelligence at half the price, with record coding scores and stronger alignment. What it means for daily work.