Frequently asked questions
Which LLM has the best vision capabilities in 2026?
Right now Gemini 3.5 Flash, GPT-5.4 and Claude Sonnet 5.5 lead (graded on Arena Elo (Vision), MMMU and GPQA Diamond plus an overall task grade). Best open-weight: Kimi K2.6. Best budget pick graded A or better: MiMo-V2.6-Flash ($0.14/$0.28 per 1M tokens).
What is MMMU and how should I read the scores?
MMMU is a benchmark of college-level questions that need both an image and text to answer: charts, diagrams, medical images, sheet music and more. A higher percentage means the model reads and reasons about images better. Human experts score well above most models.
Which open-weight vision model is best?
Kimi K2.6, Qwen3.8-27B and Gemma 4 31B are the highest-ranked open-weight models for vision right now. Vision models need extra memory for the image encoder, so check the VRAM figure before running one locally.
Can vision LLMs read documents and screenshots?
Yes. Current multimodal models read printed text, tables, charts and app screenshots well. Handwriting, very small text and dense tables are where they still make mistakes, so check extracted numbers against the source.
Which vision LLM is cheapest?
The cheapest model graded A or better for vision is MiMo-V2.6-Flash ($0.14 in / $0.28 out per 1M tokens). Image inputs are billed as tokens, so large images cost more than small ones.