The Four Tiers of AI Intelligence

The article groups LLM intelligence into four tiers by difficulty of attainment: Tier 1 (Absolute Frontier) is limited to Anthropic, OpenAI and Google, with Anthropic described as the most consistent lately; Tier 2 sits behind the frontier but above the best open source, where Moonshot's Kimi series is said to define the tier; Tier 3 is close to the best existing open source and the most crowded; Tier 4 is "the rest," which may still include strong models valued for size or cost. The author notes tiers reflect a model's position at release and that lab-specific analysis is as of November 10th, 2026.