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CATEGORY 01 · 21 TOOLS

Frontier lab / LLM

The companies and models behind most AI tools: chat models, open-weight models and APIs.

ESSENTIAL IN FRONTIER LAB / LLM

  1. Google

    Google's main account; parent of Gemini, AI Studio, Google Cloud, DeepMind and more.

    FREE TIER

  2. Google AI Studio

    Google's fastest path from prompt to prototype to production with Gemini.

    FREE TIER

  3. Mistral AI

    European frontier lab: Le Chat assistant, Mistral Vibe agent for long-horizon work and coding (@MistralVibe), and model APIs.

    FREE TIER

All 21 Frontier lab / LLM tools

  1. Google

    Google's main account; parent of Gemini, AI Studio, Google Cloud, DeepMind and more.

    EssentialFree tier

  2. Google AI Studio

    Google's fastest path from prompt to prototype to production with Gemini.

    EssentialFree tier

  3. Mistral AI

    European frontier lab: Le Chat assistant, Mistral Vibe agent for long-horizon work and coding (@MistralVibe), and model APIs.

    EssentialFree tier

  4. OpenAI Developers (OpenAI Platform & Codex)

    Official updates for developers building with Codex and the OpenAI API platform.

    EssentialFree tier

  5. Cohere

    Canadian enterprise AI company building private, deployable models (Command family, North agent platform) for regulated industries and governments;…

    Worth a lookFree trial

  6. DeepSeek

    Chinese AI lab with open-weight LLMs (DeepSeek V4 family) and a low-cost API.

    Worth a lookPay as you go

  7. Gemma (Google DeepMind)

    Google's lightweight open models built on Gemini tech (Gemma 4, Apache 2.0).

    Worth a lookFree / open source

  8. gpt-oss (OpenAI open-weight models)

    OpenAI's open-weight models you can run locally (e.g. via Ollama).

    Worth a lookFree / open source

  9. Kimi (Moonshot AI)

    Moonshot AI's Kimi assistant and models; Kimi K3 adds agent swarms, Goal mode, consultant-grade slides, Excel and PDF work.

    Worth a lookFree tier

  10. Liquid AI

    Efficient Liquid Foundation Models (LFMs) for on-device, edge and cloud AI, plus d1 decision models.

    Worth a lookFree tier

  11. Meta AI (Llama)

    Meta's AI lab and Meta AI assistant ('personal superintelligence'), plus open Llama models.

    Worth a lookFree tier

  12. MiniMax

    Multi-modal model company: MiniMax M3 LLM, H3 video, Speech 2.8, Music 3.0, plus Agent and Design apps.

    Worth a lookPay as you go

  13. Nous Research

    Open AI research lab; makers of Hermes models and Hermes Agent.

    Worth a lookFree tier

  14. Qwen (Alibaba)

    Alibaba's open foundation models and Qwen chat app: chatbot, image/video understanding, image generation, document processing and web search.

    Worth a lookFree tier

  15. Recursive (Flint)

    Recursive (Recursive Superintelligence, @Recursive_SI) is an AI lab building 'recursive self-improving' research systems.

    Worth a lookFree / open source

  16. Reflection

    AI lab making open frontier models; flagship Beam is a 501B open-weight model.

    Worth a lookPaid

  17. TypeSafe AI (Jev)

    AI lab whose 'System One' model Jev returns typed decisions with calibrated confidence, not chat.

    Worth a lookPay as you go

  18. Desert Ant Labs

    European AI lab shipping small on-device AI models and SDKs.

    NicheFree

  19. Nanbeige (Nanbeige LLM Lab)

    Chinese AI lab releasing open-weight models.

    NicheFree / open source

  20. Thinking Machines Lab

    AI research lab; ships Tinker (@tinkerapi), a post-training/fine-tuning API.

    NichePay as you go

  21. Visko

    Builds 'Live Models' to predict the world; Orbis streams interactive living worlds in real time.

    NicheFree tier