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AI lab tier list

I asked people which tier they'd put each lab in:

Frontier

Anthropicconsensus

OpenAIconsensus

n-1

1 generation behind

Google DeepMindconsensus

xAIconsensus

Meta (Muse Spark)over half say n-1

Moonshot (Kimi)over half say n-1, some n-2

Zhipu (GLM)over half say n-1, some n-2

DeepSeekover half say n-1, some n-2

Thinking Machinesleans n-1, some put n-2

n-2

2 generations behind

Alibaba (Qwen)leans n-2, some put n-1

ByteDance (Seed)over half say n-2

Xiaomi (MiMo)leans n-2, some put n-1

MiniMaxover half say n-2, some n-1

Tencent (Hy)over half say n-2

NVIDIA (Nemotron)leans n-2, some put n-3+

n-3+

3+ generations behind

Microsoft (MAI)over half say n-3+, some n-2

Cohereover half say n-3+, some n-2

Mistralover half say n-3+

Amazon (Nova)consensus

Appleconsensus

Consensus = 75%+, over half = 51%-74%, leans = the most common pick but under half, some = 20%+.

Where would you put each lab? →

See how the public votes so far differ from the panel

The public put 17 of the 20 labs in the same tier. The public was different on three:

Thinking Machines

paneln-1→publicn-2

Alibaba (Qwen)

paneln-2→publicn-1

Mistral

paneln-3+→publicn-2

The public placed some labs that the panel didn't:

n-2

Reflection

StepFun

n-3+

CognitionSSSIAAnt Group

Baidu

Sakana

AMI Labs

Sarvam

AI21

I asked 70 people. Engineers/researchers/founders at AI data cos, people at labs (I didn't count votes for their own lab), and founders/engineers at other startups. I didn't vote.