Elorian's Glimpse takes on frontier labs in visual reasoning at a fraction of the price
What happened? Elorian, the Palo Alto AI lab founded by former Google DeepMind director Andrew DaiDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, released Glimpse on October 16, its first model, as a research preview with API access and a free chat interface. Elorian calls it a "visual thinking" model. Most multimodal models look at an image once, turn it into tokens and then reason in text; Glimpse keeps going back to the source mid-reasoning, cropping into regions, pulling specific video frames or running code to measure what it sees.
The numbers: On Elorian's own evaluations, Glimpse beats OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra on scientific chart reasoning, open-vocabulary counting, short-form video captioning and robot manipulation-event understanding, and matches it on embodied spatial reasoning, while trailing it on several video and temporal reasoning tests. It is priced at $0.60 per million input tokens and $3.00 per million output tokens, which Elorian says is 94% below GPT-6 Astra and 85% below Claude Opus 5.5. The company says a small team built it with only a few hundred GPUs, post-training an open-weights base model.
The bigger picture: Text and code models have raced ahead while visual understanding has lagged. "Humans can look at Ikea diagrams, with no text, and assemble Ikea furniture, right? Why can't AI models?" Dai told TechCrunch. OpenAI added crop-and-zoom during reasoning to its o-series models in 2025; Elorian's pitch is a model built around that idea from the ground up, and cheaply. Its first targets are companies sitting on lots of video, such as robotics firms, scientific labs, media and creative companies. Longer term it wants to move from seeing to doing, including direct action outputs to control robots.
Backers: Elorian raised a $55M seed round at a $300M valuation before shipping a product, co-led by Striker Venture Partners, Menlo Ventures and Altimeter Capital, with Nvidia and Google chief scientist Jeff Dean participating. Dai spent 12 years at Google, where he led the Gemini data area.
Sources Elorian: Introducing Glimpse, TechCrunch, Andrew Dai on X. Image: still from Elorian's Glimpse launch video.
