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sudo_cowsay • today at 3:25 AM • 6 replies • view on HN

I have a question, what is considered a Frontier Model? Because its performance is kinda similar to Luna (Max)... I thought frontier meant like 6.1 Sol or 6 Astra or Opus 5.5??? Could someone explain this to me?


Replies

tibbar • today at 3:42 AM

These days people often mean the cost/performance Pareto frontier. That is, it is the best performance you can get for that cost profile.

nl • today at 4:53 AM

I agree that "frontier model" really does mean "pushing the frontier of intelligence", so Fable or Astra.

They might mean the intelligence/dollar frontier aka the Pareto frontier, but honestly much of the time that's not a great measure.

If you are doing repeated work on the same task (eg call center triage) then you can always beat a large LLM on price by fine tuning a small one.

If you are doing knowledge work then models are so varied that factors other than price are usually important. For example, lots of people moved away from Opus 5 because of it's awful English, whereas Opus 5.5 has fixed that. These things aren't measured in benchmarks.

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swiftcoder • today at 7:58 AM

The problem is that "frontier model" is a moving target. For a model dropped today we'd ideally be comparing it to the current version of Astra/Opus/Fable. But for marketing reasons its common to compare it to the previous versions thereof (which is not entirely unreasonable - they were the frontier just a few months ago)

Harukadia • today at 4:13 AM

they think the frontier mainly as more cheaply and faster. When we use that kinda model in backgroud procudure, it's actually useful a bit other open model.

handfuloflight • today at 3:27 AM

They didn't claim it's a frontier model. They claim frontier level performance.