Introducing Max

Today we are releasing Max, Arena's model router powered by our community’s 5+ million real-world votes. Max acts as an intelligent orchestrator—it routes each user prompt to the most capable model for that specific prompt. Through this, Max achieves top performance across all domains.

In today’s rapidly advancing AI landscape, models and providers are evolving to fill different niches— some models are great at coding, others are strong in math; some answer quickly, while others think longer. Max intelligently leverages the varying strength profiles of different models to produce a unified experience that is reliable across the full usage spectrum.

We recently deployed a Max version in Battle mode, codenamed theta-hat, which achieved #1 on the Arena Overall leaderboard with a score of 1500. This base version of Max is also #1 across all major categories, including Coding, Math, and Expert.

We can also make a latency-aware version of Max, providing top-level performance while keeping response latency low. Our latest latency-aware Max, codenamed arcstride, achieved an Arena score of 1495 while also reducing time-to-first-token latency by more than 16 seconds compared to the next-best model.

Going forward, latency-aware Max will be our default experience in our Direct Chat mode. We plan on continually updating and improving Max over time. Max is now available at arena.ai/max.