Best FREE AI Models This Week (20 October 2026): Top 10, New Models, What Runs at Home

This is the free AI report for the week of 20 October 2026. The best free chat model is 41 points behind the best paid one. Let's see who is on top, what's new, and what you can run at home.

Here are the ten best free chat models, ranked by blind human votes on Arena. In first place, mimo v2.6 pro from Xiaomi, with 1491 points. Then Kimi K3 Max, and glm 5.3 max. The dashed line is the best paid model.

From fourth to tenth: glm 5.3 flash, 1471; glm 5.2 max, 1470; mimo v2.5 pro, 1465; deepseek v4.1 flash max, 1463; glm 5.1, 1462; kimi k2.6, 1455; mimo v2.6 flash, 1455.

Of the top 50 chat models on Arena, paid ones included, 11 can be used for free, and 11 have open weights you can download.

2 free models entered the leaderboard this week. The highest is Kimi K3 Max, at number 25 overall.

Now the best free model in each category. For coding: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash Max. For vision: GLM 5.3 Flash. For image: qwen image 2.1. For video: minimax h3. For search: diffbot small xl. For agents: MiMo V2.6 Pro.

5 new open models came out on Hugging Face this week. The biggest is DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017, with 763 billion parameters.

The model of the week is DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017, from Deepseek-ai. It has 763 billion parameters. At 4-bit it needs about 465 gigabytes of memory. No single home machine on our list can hold it.

What can you run at home? On an RTX 3060 with 32 gigabytes of RAM, the best free model is gemma 4 26b a4b, at about 49 tokens per second. On an RTX 4090 with 64 gigabytes of RAM, the best free model is gemma 4 31b, at about 36 tokens per second. On a Mac M4 Max, the best free model is gemma 4 31b, at about 19 tokens per second.

Every free model, with sizes and speeds, is on FreeLLMArena, updated every night. See you next week.