LLMs in (March)2025

Open source is the new black

Alexandre Strube

March 26th, 2025

Website

https://helmholtz-blablador.fz-juelich.de
  • Play around! 🐶

OUTLINE

  • Present
  • Future

Present

EVERYTHING CHANGED

  • OpenAI is no longer the only game in town
  • The GPT-4 barrier was broken by Open Source (The 2023 version of GPT-4 is #63 on LM Arena)
  • Training costs are WAY down
  • Inference costs, too

The rise of China 🇨🇳

  • China is now a major player in AI
  • And they do a lot of open source!
  • 2020: USA 11 LLMs, China 2 LLMs
  • 2021: 31 LLMs on both countries (I need more recent data)

Diagram of thought

Trying to overcome limitations of Chain-Of-Thought (Andrew Chi-Chih Yao from Tsinghua University)

Huawei

  • Probably the most sanctioned company in the world
  • Selling AI Chips
  • Ascend 910C: claimed to be on par with Nvidia’s H100
  • (In practice, their chips are closed to A100)
  • Already made by SMIC (previous models were made in Taiwan by TSMC)
  • Has LLMs since 2023 on Huawei Cloud
    • Can’t download, but can fine-tune and download the finetuned models
  • Servers in EU comply with EU regulations/AI act

China Telecom

  • Already has a 1 trillion parameter model using Huawei chips
  • TeleChat2-115b
  • Meanwhile, Deutsche Telekom gives me 16mbps in Jülich, like I had in 2005 in Brazil 😥
  • Using copper, like the ancient aztecs or whatever 🗿𓂀𓋹𓁈𓃠𓆃𓅓𓆣

Baichuan AI

  • Was the first model on Blablador after Llama/Vicuna in 2023
  • Has a 1 trillion parameter model for a year already
  • Baichuan 2 is Llama 2-level, Baichuan 4 (closed) is ChatGPT-4 level (china-only)

Baidu

  • Used to be their AI leader, playing catch-up
    • Fell behind BECAUSE THEY ARE CLOSED SOURCE
  • Doing a lot of AI research
  • Ernie 4.5 from March 2025 (version 3 is open) - They swear they’ll open them in June 30th(?)
  • Ernie-Health
  • Miaoda (no-code dev)
  • I-Rag and Wenxin Yige (text to image)
  • Ernie X1 is 50% of DeepSeek’s price, same reasoning
  • 100,000+ GPU clusters

Yi (01.ai)

  • Yi 1.5 pre-trained on 3.5T tokens and then produces it’s own data and re-train on it
  • Was the best model at the beginning of 2024 on benchmarks
  • IMHO was not so good in practice 😵‍💫
  • Yi Lightning is #12 on LmArena as of 26.01.2025
  • Yi VL, multimodal in June (biggest vision model available, 34b)
  • Yi Coder was the best code model until 09.2024
  • Went quiet after that (probably busy making money, last update 11.2024)
  • https://01.ai

StepFun

  • Step-2 is #8 on LLM Arena (Higher than Claude, Llama, Grok, Qwen etc)
  • Step-1.5V is a strong multimodal model
  • Step-1V generates images
  • No open source LLM available

Alibaba

  • Qwen2.5-1M: 1m tokens for context
  • Qwen2.5-VL: (21.03.2025) 32b parameters video model: can chat through camera, play games, control your phone etc
  • BLABLADOR: alias-code for Qwen2.5-coder
  • Better than Llama
  • Open weights on HuggingFace, modelscope and free inference too
  • 28.01.2025: Qwen 2.5 MAX released (only on their website and api)
  • QwQ-32 is a reasoning model, available on Blablador (#13 on LM Arena)
  • LHM: From picture to animated 3d in seconds
  • CEO was warning yesterday about “data center bubble”

InternLM

  • InternLM-3 is an 8B model with 4x less training time than Llama 3
  • Released in 2025.01.15
  • Strube’s opinion: Previous versions were bad, need to check again

Tencent

  • Hunyuan-DiT LLM and can create images too
  • Hunyuan-T1 (24.03.2025) is a Mamba-like model with reasoning, beating o1
  • The Five: Home Robot

Zhipu

  • Real-time video conversations in commercial products, scientific paper reader, etc
  • Open source:
  • CodeGeex (runs directly on VSCode),
  • LLM: GLM4, GLM-130B
  • Visual model: CogVLM 17b/CogAgent 18b/GLM-4v-Plus
  • Image generator: GofView-3-Plus
  • CogVideoX: Video generator with 5b parameters
  • Auto Agent: AutoGLM (does things for you on your phone or web)
  • https://zhipuai.cn/en/

ByteDance: Doubao

  • Multi-modal
  • 200x cheaper than OpenAI’s GPT-4o
  • Video generation diffusion models: Doubao-PixelDance and Doubao-Seaweed

OpenBMB

  • MiniCPM-o 2.6: A GPT-4o-level multimodal model with 8B parameters
  • MiniCPM-V 2.6: A image/video/ocr model with 8B parameters.

ModelScope

You ain’t here to hear about ModelScope or OpenBMB

🐕‍🦺🐩🐕🐶

DeepSeek R1