Glossary

What is a frontier model?

A frontier model is one of the most advanced AI models available at a given time. It is usually the newest, largest and most expensive model from a leading AI lab, such as OpenAI, Anthropic or Google. The group changes every few months as new models come out. Some regulations also use the term, defined by how much computing power was used to train the model.

Why it matters for a business

Most business work never needs the frontier. For drafting, summarising, extracting and classifying, the cheaper tiers of each model family do the job at a fraction of the price and answer faster, and the frontier model of one generation becomes roughly the small, fast tier of the next. The frontier earns its cost at the edges: hard multi-step reasoning, very long documents, demanding code. The shape most work settles into is a cheap model on the volume and an expensive one on the exceptions.