Introduction 

If we had to choose one word to describe the rapid evolution of AI today, it would probably be something along the lines of explosive. As predicted by the Market Research Future report, the large language model (LLM) market in North America alone is expected to reach $105.5 billion by 2030. The exponential growth of AI tools combined with access to massive troves of text data has opened gates for better and more advanced content generation than we had ever hoped. Yet, such rapid expansion also makes it harder than ever to navigate and select the right tools among the diverse LLM models available.  

The goal of this post is to keep you, the AI enthusiast and professional, up-to-date with current trends and essential innovations in the field. Below, we highlighted the top 9 LLMs that we think are currently making waves in the industry, each with distinct capabilities and specialized strengths, excelling in areas such as natural language processing, code synthesis, few-shot learning, or scalability. While we believe there is no one-size-fits-all LLM for every use case, we hope that this list can help you identify the most current and well-suited LLM model that meets your business’s unique requirements. 

1. GPT

Our list kicks off with OpenAI's Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) models, which have consistently exceeded their previous capabilities with each new release. The latest GPT-4.5, released in February 2025, offers enhanced natural language processing capabilities and web search integration, while its predecessors GPT-4o and GPT-4o mini excel in multimodal processing across text, voice, and vision.

While GPT-4.5 demonstrates remarkable improvements in natural language processing, reduced hallucinations, and more natural interactions, other models in the ecosystem serve distinct purposes: smaller models like o3-mini and o3-mini-high have shown superior performance in math, science, and logical reasoning, GPT-4o ("omni") and its mini variant focus on multimodal capabilities, and the o1 series emphasizes reflective reasoning, with the classic GPT-4 remaining a reliable foundation.

It's important to note that GPT is a proprietary model with confidential training data and parameters, requiring a commercial license or subscription - currently priced at $200 monthly through ChatGPT Pro - making it most suitable for businesses seeking excellent conversational dialogue and real-time interactions without budget limitations.

For companies who are curious to try out the proprietary models on the market before fully committing to one due to budget constraints or uncertainties about its long-term integration, Shakudo offers a compelling alternative. Our platform currently features a diverse selection of advanced LLMs with simplified deployment and scalability. With a simple subscription, you can access and assess the value of proprietary models, like GPT, before making a substantial investment.

2. DeepSeek

With its latest R1 model, the Chinese AI company DeepSeek has once again set new benchmarks for innovation in the AI community. As of January 24th, the DeepSeek-R1 model is ranked fourth on Chatbot Arena, and top as the best open-source LM. 

The DeepSeek-R1 is a 671B parameter Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model with 37B activated parameters per token, trained through large-scale reinforcement learning with a strong focus on reasoning capabilities. The model excels at understanding and handling long-form content and demonstrates superior performance in complex tasks such as mathematics and code generation. The model is approximately 30 times more cost-efficient than OpenAI-o1 and 5 times faster, offering groundbreaking performance at a fraction of the cost. Moreover, it has shown exceptional precision in tasks requiring complex pattern recognition, such as genomic data analysis, medical imaging, and large-scale scientific simulations. 

DeepSeek-R1’s capabilities are transformative when it comes to integration with proprietary enterprise data such as PII and financial records. Leveraging retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), enterprises can connect the model to their internal data sources to enable highly personalized, context-aware interactions—all while maintaining stringent security and compliance standards. With Shakudo, you can streamline the deployment and integration of advanced AI models like DeepSeek by automating the setup, deployment, and management processes. This eliminates the need for businesses to invest in and maintain extensive computing infrastructure. By operating within your existing infrastructure, the platform ensures seamless integration, enhanced security, and optimal performance without requiring significant in-house resources or specialized expertise.

3. Qwen

Alibaba has been actively advancing its language model lineup, with Qwen2.5-Max released in early 2025, followed by the groundbreaking QwQ-32B in March. The QwQ model particularly stands out for its mathematical reasoning and coding capabilities, competing effectively with larger models like DeepSeek R1 while requiring significantly less computational resources.

Qwen2.5-Max is pretrained on over 20 trillion tokens and utilizes Mixture-of-Experts architecture for enhanced efficiency. While maintaining competitive performance across benchmarks, its design focuses on accessibility and practical deployment. The model features a 32K token context window, making it suitable for various enterprise applications.

For businesses and developers seeking comprehensive language models, the entire Qwen family spans from 1.8 billion to 72 billion parameters. All models are open-sourced under the Apache 2.0 license and available through multiple platforms including Alibaba Cloud API, Hugging Face, and ModelScope. The family has gained significant traction, with adoption by over 90,000 enterprises across consumer electronics, gaming, and other sectors.

4. Grok

Grok AI is a generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by xAI, Elon Musk's AI company. Integrated with the social media platform X (formerly Twitter), Grok offers users real-time information access and a conversational experience infused with wit and humor. It is designed to handle a wide range of tasks, including answering questions, solving problems, brainstorming ideas, and generating images from text prompts.

The latest iteration, Grok 3, was launched in February 2025. This model was trained using ten times more computing power than its predecessor, Grok 2, utilizing xAI's Colossus supercomputer. Grok 3 introduces advanced reasoning capabilities, allowing it to break down complex problems into manageable steps and verify its solutions. It also features “Think” and “Big Brain” modes for enhanced problem-solving and a new “DeepSearch” function that scans the internet and X to provide detailed summaries in response to user queries.

Since this model excels in real-time data processing, advanced reasoning, and deep internet search, we'd recommend it to companies that would require fast news analysis, coding assistance, and dynamic customer support. Research-focused entities can benefit from its ability to monitor trends and analyze emerging issues in real-time.

5. LlaMA

Meta is still leading the front with their state-of-the-art LlaMa models. The company released its latest LlaMA 3.3 model in December 2024, featuring multimodal capabilities that can process both text and image for in-depth analysis and response generation, such as interpreting charts, maps, or translating texts identified in an image. 

LlaMA 3.3 improves on previous models with a longer context window of up to 128,000 tokens and an optimized transformer architecture. With a parameter of 70 billion, this model outperforms open-source and proprietary alternatives in areas such as multilingual dialogue, reasoning, and coding.

Unlike ChatGPT models, LlaMA 3 is open-source, giving users the flexibility to access and deploy freely on their cloud depending on the specific requirements of their infrastructure, security preferences, or customization needs. We recommend this model to businesses looking for advanced content generation and language understanding, such as those in customer service, education, marketing, and consumer markets. The openness of these models also allows for your greater control over the model’s performance, tuning, and integration into existing workflows. 

6. Claude

Anthropic unveiled its most advanced AI model to date, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, which integrates multiple reasoning approaches to provide users with the flexibility of rapid responses or in-depth, step-by-step problem-solving. The model’s standout feature is its “extended thinking mode,” leveraging a technique known as deliberate reasoning or self-reflection loops to allow the model to iteratively refine its thought process, evaluate multiple reasoning paths, and optimize for accuracy before finalizing an output. 

Claude 3.7 Sonnet shows particularly strong improvements in coding and front-end web development, enabling more effective problem-solving in software engineering tasks. Its reasoning abilities are enhanced through the "extended thinking mode," which allows for deep reflection and refinement, leading to more accurate and reliable outputs. These strengths, coupled with capabilities in summarization, content generation, and conversational AI, make it an excellent choice for organizations looking for reliable AI in customer support, knowledge management, and business automation.‍

7. Mistral

Mistral's latest model – Mistral Small 3, a latency-optimized model was released under the Apache 2.0 license at the end of January. This 24-billion-parameter model is designed for low-latency, high-efficiency tasks. It processes approximately 150 tokens per second, making it over three times faster than Llama 3.3 70B on the same hardware.

This new model is ideal for applications requiring quick, accurate responses with low latency, such as virtual assistants, real-time data processing, and on-device command and control. Its smaller size allows for deployment on devices with limited computational resources.

Mistral Small 3 is currently open-source under the Apache 2.0 license. This means you can freely access and use the model for your own applications, provided you comply with the license terms. Since it is designed to be easily deployable, including on hardware with limited resources like a single GPU or even a MacBook with 32GB RAM, we'd recommend this to early-stage businesses looking to implement low-latency AI solutions without the need for extensive hardware infrastructure.

8. Gemini 

Gemini is a family of closed-source LLM models developed by Google. The latest model—Gemini 2.0 Flash—operates at twice the speed of Gemini 1.5 Pro, offering substantial improvements in speed, reasoning, and multimodal processing capabilities. 

With that being said, Gemini remains a proprietary model; if your company deals with sensitive or confidential data regularly, you might be concerned about sending it to external servers due to security reasons. To address this concern, we recommend that you double-check vendor compliance regulations to ensure data privacy and security standards are met, such as adherence to GDPR, HIPAA, or other relevant data protection laws. 

If you’re looking for an open-source alternative that exhibits capabilities almost as good as Gemini, Google’s latest Gemma model, Gemma 2, offers three models available in 2 billion, 9 billion, and 27 billion parameters with a context window of 8,200. For businesses looking for a rather economic option, this is the optimal choice that interprets and understands messages with remarkable accuracy.

9. Command

Command R is a family of scalable models developed by Cohere with the goal of balancing high performance with strong accuracy, just like Claude. Both the Command R and Command R+ models offer APIs specifically optimized for Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). This means that these models can combine large-scale language generation with real-time information retrieval techniques for much more contextually aware outputs. 

Currently, the Command R+ model boasts 104 billion parameters and offers an industry-leading 128,000 token context window for enhanced long-form processing and multi-turn conversation capabilities.

One of the perks of working with an open-source model is also to avoid vendor lock-in. Heavy reliance on a particular type of proprietary model may make it difficult for you to switch to alternative models when your business starts growing or the landscape changes. Cohere approaches this in a hybrid way, meaning that you can access and modify the model for personal usage but need a license for commercial use. In this case, we recommend this model for businesses that want flexibility in experimentation without a long-term commitment to a single vendor.