If the model is truly on par with Opus 4.6/Gemini 3.1/GPT 5.4 (beyond benchmarks) this still puts MSL in the frontier lab category, which is no small feat given that they pretty much rebooted last year
Many labs aren't able to keep up with the frontier, xAI, Mistral
Fourth place means you're not reliant on any of the external providers for internal AI use, which is important for organizational health and negotiating with those other providers.
I’m not sure it’s useful for negotiating, the capex to build it was surely orders of magnitude more than it would cost to just use one of the other frontier models.
It’s like someone negotiating by saying, “I’ll waste even MORE money to build something worse if you don’t give me a deal.”
I’m not discounting there may be other advantages to doing it. I just don’t think negotiating is one.
Why would you use this instead of the other more proven models? Unless it's significantly cheaper. The general population mostly wants it free, and the more professional users are willing to pay for good/better responses.
You wouldn't use this as an API. You would "use" this inside the meta properties. Have a shop on fb marketplace? Now you have copy, images, support, chat, translations, erp, esp, fps and all the other acronyms :) and so on for your mom and pop shop @200$/mo. Probably worse than say claude/gemini but it's right there, one button away. "Click here to upgrade to AI++" or something.
I won't use it, but I'm excited to see it for the same reason why I'm excited to see a near-frontier open-source release: more competition pushes prices down and reduces monopoly/cartel risk. I won't use Muse or Grok or GLM at this point but they're good for the ecosystem.
Their new Contemplating mode gives this model a Deep Research ability (akin to existing models from GPT and Gemini) that might make it quite comparable to the just-announced Mythos.