AI model comparison

The ceiling — problems where being right matters more than the bill

Agentic coding and multi-step engineering work — near the ceiling, at half the price

The strongest generalist — complex agentic and scientific work across modalities

Reasoning over very long inputs — whole codebases, long documents, video

Agentic coding with tool use, especially inside xAI's own tooling

The default for most work — reads code like a senior engineer at a fair price

Production workloads that need frontier-family quality without the flagship bill

High-volume agent loops and prototyping — cheap enough to run constantly

Classification, routing, and extraction at volume

High-volume, low-latency work where speed and cost matter most

Open reasoning at a fraction of the cost of closed reasoning models

Frontier-adjacent quality you can self-host — the open model closest to the closed leaders

A strong open model for local use, especially good at coding for its size

Running locally or self-hosting — private, free to run, no vendor lock-in

Efficient European open models for building without heavy lock-in