Ask HN: What was the last task where only a frontier model could do it?

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A Hacker News user asks about the last task where only a frontier model could do it, sparking discussion on the limits of current AI capabilities.

ive been seeing a recurring claim that open (weight) models 6 months behind the frontier are good enough for the majority of ‘work’. if you&#x27;ve had a concrete task in the last month where GLM&#x2F;DeepSeek&#x2F;Kimi&#x2F;Qwen failed and Opus&#x2F;Fable&#x2F;GPT succeeded (or vice versa!), please share<p>Ill provide a template as ive also frequently seen posters complain about a lack of context: - task (short and specific) - cheap model tried &amp; how it failed - frontier model &amp; did it actually succeed - would frontier-1 have been fine in hindsight?
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Cached at: 07/10/26, 06:12 PM

# Ask HN: What was the last task where only a frontier model could do it? Source: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48863171](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48863171) ![](https://news.ycombinator.com/s.gif)[https://news.ycombinator.com/vote?id=48863261&how=up&goto=item%3Fid%3D48863171](https://news.ycombinator.com/vote?id=48863261&how=up&goto=item%3Fid%3D48863171)[talloaktrees](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=talloaktrees)[1 minute ago](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48863261)\| \[–\] I have been experimenting with dissassembly and rewrite of 90s dos games in Rust\. It's not something I have experience in so I rely heavily on the models setting the direction and automating the work\. It's something where the level of intelligence has a huge impact\. I still haven't succeeded, it's mostly an experiment for me to test the edges of model capabilities and see how they tackle such a hard problem\. [reply](https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=48863261&goto=item%3Fid%3D48863171%2348863261)

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