Vercel's AI Gateway now offers DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017, a minor update to V4.1 Flash. It is described as better at reasoning, coding, agentic tasks and image understanding, while finishing tasks faster with shorter outputs, which should make agent runs cheaper.
Microsoft's AI research group has detailed MAI-Base-2, which it says is significantly more efficient than leading open-source alternatives. It is a base model rather than a finished assistant, meant to be turned into a full LLM through further training.
StepFun has published Step 5 Preview as an open-weight model, with FP8 and BF16 checkpoints on Hugging Face and ModelScope. The sparse mixture-of-experts model is built for long agentic tasks, with 600 billion parameters in total, 27 billion active per token and a context of up to one million tokens.
TypeSafe launched Jev, a decision model that returns a label, a score or a yes/no probability from answers the user defines, on 15 September. In roughly four weeks at least 20 rivals appeared, from Cloudflare, OpenAI, Perplexity, Liquid AI, AWS's Strands Labs and independent developers.
Elorian has released Glimpse, its first AI model, built to reason visually. According to the company's own evaluations, it beats GPT-6 Astra on scientific chart reasoning and short video captioning, with competitive results on other visual tasks.
Data from Vercel's AI Gateway, a unified API service similar to OpenRouter, shows Jev has been adopted faster than any other model on the platform.