Foundation models (substrate reference)
13 systems in the foundation models (substrate reference) category of the AI Agent Infrastructure Landscape, grouped by maturity tier.
Tier 1 — battle-tested (9)
- Alibaba Qwen 3 family Open-weights frontier model family (Qwen 3 dense + MoE; 0.5B–235B)
Alibaba Cloud's Qwen 3 family (2025-04) — open-weights frontier models from 0.5B to 235B-A22B MoE. Apache 2.0 (most sizes) — broadest open-weights family. Includes Qwen 3 32B dense, Qwen 3 30B-A3B MoE, Qwen 3 235B-A22B MoE. Qwen-Coder, Q…
- Anthropic Claude (foundation models) Frontier foundation model family (Sonnet 4 / Opus 4.5 / Haiku 4.5)
Claude family of frontier foundation models — Sonnet 4 (workhorse), Opus 4.5 (frontier capability), Haiku 4.5 (fast/cheap). Frontier model used as substrate by Claude Code, Anthropic Memory tool, Cline, Aider, Continue.dev, Cursor, Goose…
- Cohere Command R+ / Command A Enterprise-focused frontier model family (Command A / Command R+ / Command R7B)
Toronto-based foundation-model lab (Aidan Gomez, ex-Google Brain 'Attention Is All You Need' co-author). Command family is enterprise / RAG-optimised: Command A (Mar-2025, 111B dense, 256k ctx), Command R+ (104B MoE), Command R7B (smalle…
- DeepSeek R1 / V3 family Open-weights reasoning-first frontier model family (R1 / V3 / V3.1)
DeepSeek (Hangzhou-based, Liang Wenfeng founder) — released DeepSeek-V3 671B MoE (37B active) Dec-2024, then R1 reasoning model Jan-2025 that matched o1 at ~3% of inference cost. Caused 'DeepSeek moment' in markets Jan-27-2025 — NVIDIA d…
- Google Gemini 3 family Frontier foundation model family (Gemini 3 Pro / Flash / Nano)
Google DeepMind's Gemini 3 frontier model family — Gemini 3 Pro (top tier), 3 Flash (fast), 3 Nano (on-device). Substrate for Google Workspace AI, Vertex AI Agent Platform, Gemini Code Assist, Project Mariner, and Project Astra. Multimod…
- Meta Llama 4 family Open-weights frontier model family (Llama 4 Scout / Maverick / Behemoth)
Meta's Llama 4 family (released 2025-04) — Scout (109B MoE, 17B active), Maverick (400B MoE, 17B active), Behemoth (2T MoE, 288B active; preview). First Llama generation to use mixture-of-experts and to be multimodal-native. Substrate fo…
- Mistral Large 2 / Mixtral family Frontier model family — Mistral Large 2 + Mixtral 8x22B + Mistral Small 3
French frontier-model lab (Paris). Family includes Mistral Large 2 (123B dense, Jul-2024), Mixtral 8x22B (open-weights MoE), Mistral Small 3 (24B, open-weights Jan-2025), Codestral (code specialist). EU-headquartered alternative to US/Ch…
- OpenAI GPT family (GPT-5 / GPT-4o / o3 / o4) Frontier foundation model family (GPT-5 / GPT-4o / o3 / o4)
OpenAI's foundation model family — GPT-5 (2025-08 flagship), GPT-4o (multimodal workhorse), o3/o4 reasoning series. Substrate for ChatGPT, the OpenAI API, Microsoft Copilot, Azure OpenAI, and many downstream agents in this catalog (Devin…
- xAI Grok 4 Frontier foundation model from xAI (Grok 4)
Elon Musk's xAI frontier model — Grok 4 launched 2025-07. Trained on Colossus (100k+ GPU supercluster in Memphis). Deeply integrated with X/Twitter (real-time tweet data access). Grok 4 Heavy variant for premium tier. No frontier-tier op…
Tier 2 — production-ready (4)
- 01.AI Yi family Open-weights frontier-tier Chinese model family (Yi-Lightning / Yi-34B)
Kai-Fu Lee's 01.AI (founded 2023, Beijing). Yi family open-weights — Yi-34B (2023), Yi-Large (proprietary 2024), Yi-Lightning (2024-10, frontier-tier, matched GPT-4o on LMSYS chatbot arena). Apache 2.0 (Yi-34B and base sizes). Important …
- Amazon Nova family AWS-native foundation model family (Nova Pro / Lite / Micro / Premier / Canvas / Reel)
Amazon's first-party foundation model family, launched at AWS re:Invent Dec-2024. Nova Pro (multimodal mid-tier), Nova Lite (multimodal cheap), Nova Micro (text-only fast), Nova Canvas (image gen), Nova Reel (video gen). Premier frontier…
- Microsoft Phi-4 family Small / efficient open-weights model family (Phi-4 14B + Phi-4 multimodal + Phi-4 mini)
Microsoft Research's Phi family of small, data-curation-focused open-weights models. Phi-4 (14B, Dec-2024) matches much larger models on STEM benchmarks. Phi-4 Multimodal (5.6B, Feb-2025) integrates speech + vision + text. MIT license. S…
- Reka Core / Flash / Edge Multimodal foundation model family — Reka Core / Flash / Edge
SF / Singapore foundation-model startup founded by ex-DeepMind / Meta / Google researchers (Dani Yogatama, Yi Tay, Qi Liu). Native multimodal models — Reka Core (~67B, frontier candidate), Flash (~21B), Edge (~7B). Apr-2024: claimed Core…