I was confused too, but I believe that it refers to the Pareto Frontier: the best set of solutions to a multi-objective problem.
Look it up, it’s a bit difficult to explain concisely in words but it is intuitive visually.
If we are thinking of intelligence and price, a model will be in the Pareto Frontier if there’s no cheaper model of the same or higher intelligence. Or if there’s no more intelligent model for that price or lower.
EDIT: See this chart from Artificial Analysis: https://artificialanalysis.ai/#intelligence-comparison-tabs
So for example DeepSeek V4 Pro can be considered a frontier model because there's no cheaper model that is as intelligent.
For any solution in the Pareto Frontier, there no "no-brainer" alternative, in the sense that there's no other option that is better in some way without giving up something else. It's the best of its "weight-class".
I think this is one of the easiest to understand.
https://arena.ai/leaderboard/text/pareto
That’s a good visualization, although I am a bit mistrustful of Arena’s scores. It does get around the fact that models are getting trained for the benchmarks, but the methodology of letting random people compare outputs side-by-side is a very shallow judgement method in my opinion.
EDIT: Indeed looking at the overall rankings for text again, the list is rather strange, a lot more about writing style than intelligence.
Very interesting rabbit hole for today. Thanks for mentioning Pareto frontier!
The subtitle on their website is: "Nativ puts frontier intelligence on your desk".
Also, the title is "Run AI models locally on your Mac," not "Run frontier open models locally on your Mac."