Frontier lab intelligence

A cross-card read of GPT-5.6, GLM-5.2 and Kimi-K2-Thinking: the closed leader publishes zero capability comparisons while the two open labs publish incompatible ones — so the leaderboard everyone wants cannot be built from primary sources. That void is the eval product.

Master benchmark inventory of the GPT-5.6 system card with web-verified cross-vendor comparison and the eval-shift Sankey — every claim tied to a page.

Zhipu’s MIT-licensed flagship is in the Opus/GPT-5.5/Gemini tier on agentic SWE while trailing on broad knowledge — and its own cross-vendor table shows why "the harness is the benchmark".

Moonshot’s open 1T-MoE thinking agent holds the top of agentic web research (BrowseComp SOTA, 200–300 tool calls without drift) while trailing closed frontier on raw coding — a distinct open frontier from GLM-5.2’s agentic engineering.

What 128 open eval-relevant roles reveal about frontier eval investment, for two audiences: people who want to get hired, and people who want to sell to the labs.

What 715 open infrastructure/systems roles reveal about the GPU buildout — physical first — for two audiences: people who want to get hired in infra, and people who want to sell infra to the labs and neoclouds.

What 127 open safety/alignment/red-team roles reveal about the safety org (OpenAI out-hires Anthropic in raw count), for two audiences: get hired into safety, and sell safety tooling to the labs.

What 86 open human-data / annotation / data-quality roles reveal about the fuel layer — the clearest "sell to the labs" buy signal, since labs structurally buy data rather than build it.

Amazon's public signal this cycle is bifurcated. Press reporting indicates most flagship Nova models are being wound down and resources consolidated into Frontier Model Research under Pieter Abbeel, with a new flagship expected at re:Invent , while Amazon Science continues shippi

Anthropic's September 2026 signals show a lab running three plays at once: pushing frontier capability into math and science ; hardening and publicly disclosing its safety/alignment machinery ; and industrializing compute, finance, and go-to-market ahead of a reported IPO . The w

DeepSeek's center of gravity is shifting from flagship frontier models toward agentic productization and efficiency infrastructure. The dominant recent artifact is DeepSeek Harness ('dsh'), an MIT-licensed TypeScript agent harness built on an 'everything is a plugin' Cordis archi

Cohere is running a security-first, enterprise-and-sovereign play rather than a consumer-scale model race. The dominant signals in this pack are commercialization and deployment buildout: a dense wave of forward-deployed engineering (FDE) hiring across Infrastructure, Agentic Pla

Baidu is running two visible plays in this pack. First, a heavy open-source, deployment-and-interoperability push across the PaddlePaddle ecosystem — PaddlePaddle v3.0, PaddleOCR v3.x, PaddleX v3.x, and Paddle2ONNX v2.x — aimed at multi-hardware inference, serving, and model expo