I don't know that I agree with this specific use of frontier because it is confusable as you say.

But (off on a tangent) I do think that there are multiple frontiers generally — and I also think the open weights, small local model frontier is by far the most important and exciting one.

I keep mucking about with what Gemma 4 12B can do and every time I do I find myself thinking that all the energies in the AI world are going in entirely the wrong direction, because it is small, clever, efficient and remarkable.

If all of that research money were to be spent on improving AI models that fit inside a 16GB RAM machine with unified memory, I think really important progress could be made.

I enjoy using the Qwen 3.6 models (and BottleCap's new fine tune of the 27B) but the small Gemma 4 models are impressive in a way that I think is going quite unreported.

So while I don't think this website should use the word "frontier" here, even referring to Qwen 3.6 27B which is weirdly close, I think it could.