The closest alternative to Ling-2.6-1T is Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite Preview — comparable intelligence (33.5 vs 33.6); for a cheaper option, Nemotron 3 Ultra (free) runs Free/M vs $0.075/M; for more speed, gpt-oss-120b (free) hits 554 t/s; and the best open-weight substitute is MiniMax M3.
Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite Preview is the closest alternative to Ling-2.6-1T, with an Intelligence Index of 33.5 (Ling-2.6-1T scores 33.6) at $0.250 per million input tokens.
Yes — Nemotron 3 Ultra (free) costs Free per million input tokens versus $0.075 for Ling-2.6-1T, while staying within ~8 points of its Intelligence Index.
MiniMax M3 is the strongest open-weight alternative to Ling-2.6-1T — downloadable from Hugging Face and self-hostable, scoring 54.7 on intelligence.