September 2026
Intermediate
5 pages
13m
English
Content preview from Radar Trends to Watch: September 2026
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Coauthored with Claude
September 1, 2026
Midway through each month, I think “The next Trends is going to be small. Not much is happening.” This is the first time that I’ve been right. Was everyone on vacation in August? Am I becoming jaded? There were many model releases, though few of them seemed significant. Then again, it may be time to get over the one-upmanship by the frontier vendors and spend more time thinking about the myriad small and open-weight models. Every month, the best laptop-scale models (30B and smaller) seem closer to the leading frontier models. And every month, we’re seeing organizations realize that paying premium per-token prices for the latest frontier models gives at best a small advantage over the best open-weight models.
AI models
Capability and model size are decoupling. Several models here run comfortably on a laptop or a single accelerator while claiming performance close to much larger frontier systems. While it can be hard to work with a smaller model without thinking that you’re choosing “second best,” the biggest model isn’t always the right choice. Major releases aside, the most important news from August might be Anthropic’s deployment of watermarks for text. If the watermarking scheme works, it will be possible to tell which parts of an article like this were written by AI.
- OpenAI has announced that, beginning November ...
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