Weights, fine-tunes, runtimes, and the projects keeping the field auditable.
San Francisco startup founded by ex-Googlers ships four open-source hybrid reasoning models — 70B, 109B, 405B, 671B — using a technique called Iterated Distillation and Amplification (IDA) to distill search-time reasoning back into model weights.
Microsoft's small-language-model bet now includes Phi-4-mini, Phi-4-multimodal (text+audio+vision in one), Phi-4-reasoning, Phi-4-reasoning-plus, Phi-4-mini-reasoning, and Phi-4-reasoning-vision. Reportedly beats DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-70B at most benchmarks despite far smaller size.
Granite 4.1 covers 3B / 8B / 30B language models, Granite Vision 4.1 (top score on 7 chart/table/KVP extraction benchmarks), two ASR speech models, embeddings, and a Granite Guardian 4.1 safety classifier — every variant under Apache 2.0. The 8B dense model reportedly matches or beats 32B MoE systems.
Mistral Medium 3.5 (Apr 29) is a frontier multimodal model targeted at agentic and coding workloads. It's the headline at the end of a stretch where Mistral shipped Small 4 (unifying Magistral/Pixtral/Devstral), Voxtral TTS, Leanstral for formal proofs, and the Forge enterprise platform — all between March 16 and end of April.
Nemotron 3 Nano Omni (April 28) unifies vision, audio, language, and text into one open multimodal model. The architecture is the interesting bit: a hybrid Mamba-Transformer MoE with 30B parameters and only 3B activated per forward pass.
Qwen 3.6 Plus dropped April 2; Qwen 3.6 Max Preview followed April 20. Alibaba's framing: "accelerating agentic AI deployment for enterprises and Alibaba's AI applications." Built on the Qwen 3.5 native-multimodal foundation from February, which supports 201 languages.
Gemma 4 (April 2) arrives in E2B / E4B / 26B MoE / 31B Dense variants with native image+video everywhere and native audio on the smaller models. 256K context, 140+ languages, agentic-workflow-oriented. The 31B Dense reportedly hit #3 on Arena's text leaderboard.