The Best AI Models of March 2026
GPT-5.4, MiniMax 2.7 and more!
GPT-5.4, MiniMax M2.7 and more!
While March 2026 was a relatively slow month for model releases, GPT-5.4 pushed the frontiers of AI capabilities to new heights and was far and away the main event.
March 2026 Model Releases
Released March 5, 2026, GPT-5.4 certainly impressed us with state-of-the-art results on multiple benchmarks, earning its place as a Tier 1 model by March standards alongside Opus 4.6 and Gemini 3.1 Pro.
Anthropic, Google, and xAI were conspicuously absent from releasing models this month, though that is understandable given Anthropic and Google each released models in February, and xAI is taking a bit more time before coming out with its next release.
As for the Chinese labs, xAI, Z.ai, Alibaba, Moonshot and DeepSeek were in between release cycles as well, but the following Chinese labs released new models this month:
March 18, 2026: MiniMiax released MiniMax-M2.7
March 18, 2026: Xiaomi released MiMo-V2-Pro
Updated Model Rankings
As we update our model rankings, we see that GPT-5.4 firmly sits in Tier 1 while the lesser but still impressive capabilities of MiniMax-M2.7 and MiMo-V2-Pro earn them each spots in Tier 2.
Tier 1
Gemini-3.1-Pro
GPT-5.4 (New)
Opus-4.6
Tier 2
Grok-4.20
Kimi K2.5
GLM-5
DeepSeek-V3.2
MiniMax-M2.7 (New)
Qwen3.5-397B
MiMo-V2-Pro (New)
Looking Forward
In a follow-up post, we’ll dig into the benchmarks of the various AI models released this month and assess them on IQ, EQ, coding, math, science, and several other critical dimensions.
In the meantime you can dig into the data and view the AI model graphs on aiiq.org.
Stay tuned for more.