Behind the scenes at the AI frontier
Stan van Baarsen
Stan van Baarsen
Stan van Baarsen
AI PlanCo-author of the Nationaal AI Deltaplan, the national AI plan for the Netherlands, 2025
Author of a scenario on Europe’s dependence on foreign AI, 2026
Now at Cursive, a new AI lab in London founded by former Google DeepMind researchers
Where the big labs are heading
How close we are
Which labs will remain?
What it means for us
Part 1 of 4
“A true automated AI researcher”
“A country of geniuses in a datacenter”
“Solve intelligence, and then use that to solve everything else”
Chat
Reasoning
Code
Terminal and tools
Browser and computer use
AI research
Models that help build the next model
Spatial reasoning
Next: general-purpose robots
Science
Maths, chemistry, biology, health care
Chip design
More efficient chips for the next models
Professional work
Finance, law, office software
One good way to keep track of what the frontier labs are working on: look at what data they are buying.
Hourly rates for training AI models, October 2026
Civil rights attorney
Condensed matter physicist
Software engineer
Average on Mercor
Mercor, one of the biggest data brokers, recently surpassed $2 billion in annualised revenue.
Practice worlds where a model attempts a task and gets scored
Find the cheapest two-bedroom listing for these dates
Compute the five-year growth rate
Build a pivot table of revenue by region
Fix the bug so the tests pass
What labs pay for them
$200 to $2,000
about $20,000
about $300,000
~$1 billion at Anthropic alone
Spirit Airlines’ archive goes to auction: about 100 million emails and 500 million Teams messages. Google bids $10 million.
Halluminate, nine people, sells finance practice worlds to four of the top five US labs
Robot-data start-ups raise millions to pay people to film their own hands at work
Munich start-up MicroAGI offers New Yorkers free house cleaning. The cleaners wear head cameras, and the footage trains robots.
Start-ups that shut down are now making money by selling their data, including their Slack, Notion and code.
Anthropic bought print books in bulk, cut off the spines, scanned the pages and threw the paper away.
Claude writes more than 80% of the code merged at Anthropic
OpenAI says it has reached its ‘automated AI research intern’
OpenAI’s target for a fully automated AI researcher
Major model releases. A new frontier model from OpenAI or Anthropic now arrives every six to eight weeks.
Google DeepMind, July 2026: one model controls a whole humanoid
Physical Intelligence, November 2025: robots that learn from experience
Figure, 2026: in a pilot on BMW’s factory floor
Genie 3 turns a prompt into a world you can move through
An AI agent practising tasks inside one of those worlds
Waymo, built on Genie 3: an elephant or a tornado on the road, on demand
Part 2 of 4
Gold-medal score at the International Mathematical Olympiad
Erdős’s 1946 unit-distance conjecture disproved
Claude writes a complete machine-checked proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem
OpenAI claims a proof for a version of Navier–Stokes, a Millennium Prize problem
“At this point nothing would surprise me.”
Thomas Bloom, mathematician, Manchester
“The shock is immense. I am paralysed.”
Hugo Duminil-Copin, Fields medallist
“I mourn the path not taken, and the opportunities lost in the frantic race to develop this technology.”
Terence Tao, Fields medallist
“It was a privilege of a lifetime to get to do research level maths. But not like this. How much beauty have we lost?”
Sam Hughes, mathematician
“Once AI started to solve them, there is no point anymore.”
Noga Alon, mathematician, Princeton
Designs better proteins with AI, for Bayer, Lundbeck and others
AI-designed enzymes that insert DNA at more than 10,000 disease-related sites
Designs new materials; raised $450 million in July
Its AI-discovered drug for lung fibrosis entered a phase 3 trial in July
Raised $2.1 billion to design drugs with AlphaFold; first patients expected by the end of 2026
Law
Software engineering
Finance
Science
Customer service
Part 3 of 4
Law
Software engineering
Finance
Science
Customer service
Data centres and chips, planned for 2026
Amazon
Alphabet
Microsoft
Meta
Raised by the labs in 2026
OpenAI, valued at $852bn
Anthropic, valued at $965bn
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Cursor retrains its coding model on live feedback from users, and ships a new version as often as every five hours.
Best model from each lab on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, 25 October 2026
Anthropic
Claude Opus 5.5
Meta
Muse Wonder Full
Moonshot AI
Kimi K3.1 Pro
OpenAI
GPT-6 Astra
Google DeepMind
Gemini 4 Argon
Yann LeCun. World models. $1.03 billion
Mira Murati. Customisable AI. $2 billion
David Silver. Learning from experience. $1.1 billion
Pim de Witte. Agents trained on game clips. Valued at $6.2 billion
Ex-DeepMind researchers. Custom AI models for specific verticals that keep learning in deployment
• Kimi K3.1 Pro: about five weeks behind the US frontier, the smallest gap yet
• The best open models are now mostly Chinese: Moonshot, Xiaomi, Zhipu, DeepSeek, Qwen
• Meta has gone closed for its frontier models
• OpenAI has released no new open model since August 2025
• You can run them on your own servers, and keep your data
“I think the next tier of risk is actually AI companies themselves.”
Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, January 2026
The hopeful version: most useful work runs on models that are good enough and cheap, and the frontier labs keep what only the frontier can do.
Part 4 of 4
Feel the AGI
AGI-pilled
Timelines
GPU-poor
Tokenmaxxing
Post-AGI
“We could summarize this as a “country of geniuses in a datacenter”.”
“…compress the progress that human biologists would have achieved over the next 50-100 years into 5-10 years.”
“…likely to vastly improve treatments for, or even cure, most mental illness…”
“…a dream scenario … would be 20% annual GDP growth rate in the developing world…”
“I think it is very likely a mistake to believe that tasks you undertake are meaningless simply because an AI could do them better.”
“I think many will be literally moved to tears by it.”
“The shock is immense. I am paralysed.”
Hugo Duminil-Copin, Fields medallist
“Please leave me alone for an hour, I need to digest this thing.”
José Penadés, Imperial College
Stan van Baarsen · mail@stanvanbaarsen.nl