Subscribe
Floor / Ceiling
Projects Floor / Ceiling

Open AI baseline tracker

Floor / Ceiling

A public tracker for the moving floor of open-weight AI against the proprietary frontier ceiling.

This tracker compares two moving AI baselines: the proprietary ceiling and the open-weight floor.

The ceiling is the best frontier capability available through closed systems such as GPT-5.5 Pro or Claude Opus 4.7. The floor is the strongest open model you could still use if those proprietary systems disappeared tomorrow.

What the floor means

The floor is not the average open model. It is the strongest openly available fallback for a domain, such as coding, agentic work, or general reasoning.

That matters because the floor tells you what capability has become durable. Once the weights are public and the licence is permissive, the baseline is much harder to remove from the world.

Current snapshot

The first snapshot treats Kimi K2.6, GLM-5.1, DeepSeek V4 Pro, Xiaomi MiMo V2.5 Pro, and Ling-2.6-1T as the current open floor candidates, with GPT-5.5 Pro and Claude Opus 4.7 as the proprietary ceiling candidates.

The model selection is editorial, but the points and gaps now use Artificial Analysis as of 1 May 2026: Coding Index for coding, Agentic Index for agentic work, and Intelligence Index for general reasoning. When a side lists multiple models, the side score is the highest published AA score among those models. Ling-2.6-1T currently has an AA Intelligence Index reference in this tracker, so it is listed as an open-floor candidate without changing the coding or agentic gaps.

Why track it monthly

AI progress is easier to understand when the floor and ceiling are separated. Some months the ceiling jumps. Other months the floor catches up. The important long-run question is not whether one lab is briefly ahead, but how much capability remains available even without the frontier APIs.