Ideogram 4

Ideogram 4 is a closed image lab's first open weights: a 9.3B from-scratch flow-matching model with the best text rendering of any open model, running on a single 24GB GPU. The catch is the license: free to play with, 300 dollars a month to ship. The honest version.

Nemotron 3 Ultra

NVIDIA's Nemotron 3 Ultra is a 550B hybrid Mamba-MoE built for long-running agents, the most intelligent US open-weights model, and NVIDIA shipped the data and recipes too, under a permissive license. What it is, what is open, and why you still cannot run it at home.

Mistral Large 3

Mistral Large 3 is a 675B Mixture-of-Experts flagship under Apache 2.0, Mistral taking its best model out from behind a research-only license. The licensing is the story; the benchmarks are good, not frontier. Here is the honest version.