Frontier models are the most advanced AI systems available at any given time, operating at the edge of what current technology can achieve in reasoning, planning, and autonomous action. They are typically very large, often multimodal, and represent significant investments in training compute.
Their capabilities define what is possible with AI at the leading edge. But they also typically carry higher cost per query, greater unpredictability, and more complexity to operate than smaller, more specialized models. Choosing when to use a frontier model versus a smaller, purpose-built one is an important design decision in production enterprise AI systems.
