If we are discussing technology today, you can’t ignore trending topics like Generative AI and large language models (LLMs) that power AI chatbots. Following the release of ChatGPT by OpenAI, the race to build the best LLM has grown multi-fold. Large corporations, small startups, and the open-source community are developing the most advanced LLMs, including reasoning models. So far, we have seen more than hundreds of LLMs, but which are the most capable ones? To find out, follow our list of the best large language models (LLMs) in 2025.
1. OpenAI o3 and o1
When ChatGPT was launched in late 2022, OpenAI was the leader with the best large language model with its GPT-3 series models. And even today in 2025, OpenAI reigns supreme with its o-series reasoning models. OpenAI o1 was announced in September 2024 with a new inference-scaling technique and quickly dethroned all traditional LLMs out there.
After just three months, OpenAI reiterated its focus on inference scaling and announced the breakthrough o3 series of models that demonstrated generalization in LLMs for the first time in history. It finally cracked the ARC-AGI benchmark at high compute settings. Although the cost was pretty high to achieve generalization, it goes on to show that LLMs can generalize to some degree when given more time and compute to “think”.
Currently, OpenAI has rolled out the smaller o3-mini and o3-mini-high models for free and ChatGPT Plus users, respectively. And the full o3 model is available through OpenAI’s Deep Research agent which is gaining praise from the scientific community. OpenAI will release the standalone o3 full model in a few months after proper safety testing.
The company has suggested that we are at the very beginning of the inference-scaling curve, and capabilities are going to rapidly improve in just one year. So expect OpenAI to keep the lead in the AI race in the coming months, especially with o-series models built on top of GPT-5.
2. DeepSeek R1
DeepSeek, a rising Chinese AI lab has shocked the world with its cost-efficient R1 reasoning LLM. It became the first company to replicate OpenAI’s o1 model and open-sourced the RL (Reinforcement learning) and GRPO (Group Relative Policy Optimization) techniques. Not only that, DeepSeek demonstrated that AI labs can achieve o1-level performance at a training cost of just $5.8 million, significantly lower than the astronomical cost of training large language models.
After DeepSeek released the R1 LLM for free, it soared to the top position on the App Store, beating ChatGPT in its own game. Besides that, the US stock market was thrown into a tizzy amid concerns that Western AI labs are overspending on training AI models. In my comparison between DeepSeek R1 and OpenAI o1, I found that DeepSeek R1 delivers promising results, but doesn’t outrightly beat o1 in all cases.
Nevertheless, currently, we only have the DeepSeek R1 reasoning LLM from China that comes very close to matching OpenAI’s o1 performance.
3. Claude 3.5 Sonnet (New)
While OpenAI has released the powerful o3-mini reasoning model which is optimized for coding, many developers still rally behind the Claude 3.5 Sonnet LLM for coding tasks. Many argue that Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet is still the best LLM for coding.
The secret sauce is that much before OpenAI, Anthropic used RL (Reinforcement learning) to make Claude 3.5 Sonnet smarter and more intelligent. However, Anthropic has not released a reasoning model based on inference-scaling yet.
Anthropic did update the Claude 3.5 Sonnet (New) model in October 2024 and improved its overall capability, be it graduate-level knowledge or reasoning. In my own testing, I have found that Claude 3.5 Sonnet is perhaps the best traditional, non-reasoning LLM in the market.
On top of that, it has a fun personality, unlike other boring LLMs. So whether it’s creative writing or technical questions, Claude 3.5 Sonnet outranks all other large language models and ranks among the best ChatGPT alternatives.
4. GPT-4o
After GPT-4, OpenAI released GPT-4o in May 2024 which finally added support for multimodality — the ability to understand text, images, videos, and audio simultaneously. Since then, GPT-4o has been OpenAI’s traditional LLM and it has received countless incremental updates behind the scenes. In my assessment, GPT-4o is a rock-solid non-reasoning LLM from OpenAI right now.
I always go back to GPT-4o on ChatGPT for all kinds of tasks. It’s not a specialist model for coding or complex reasoning, but for world knowledge and learning about new things, GPT-4o has demonstrated superior reliability over other LLMs. GPT-4o now powers ChatGPT Advanced Voice Mode, Live Video, Canvas, file analysis, and more. OpenAI says the ability to generate images using GPT-4o is coming pretty soon.
5. Gemini 2.0 Flash
In the AI race, we expected Google to outrank OpenAI and Anthropic with its Gemini LLM, but as far as large language models are concerned, Google is sadly still behind, likely due to its overly cautious approach. Just to be clear, Google has caught up in video generation with Veo 2 and image generation with Imagen 3. However, in language processing, I find Gemini models to be overly sanitized.
Gemini models are much more verbose and lack a personality. It also avoids discussion even on slightly sensitive topics. That said, Google has done a remarkable job with multimodality. Gemini models are perhaps the best LLMs if you want to process images, videos, audio, and text. On top of that, they offer a huge context length of up to 2 million tokens.
Among all the Gemini LLMs, Gemini 2.0 Flash stands out because of its cost-efficiency. It’s a relatively smaller model but rivals GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet in creative writing and world knowledge. Even the latest Gemini 2.0 Pro model barely beats the Gemini 2.0 Flash in several benchmarks. However, in coding tasks, Gemini 2.0 Pro delivers better performance.
As for reasoning LLMs, Google has indeed released Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking based on inference scaling just like OpenAI o1, but it has disappointed so far. In my testing between Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking and OpenAI o1, I concluded that Google’s reasoning model is not smarter than OpenAI’s o1 model. Google should release the Thinking model based on the larger Gemini 2.0 Pro LLM if it wants to seriously challenge OpenAI.
6. Qwen 2.5 Max
After DeepSeek’s rise, another LLM from China called Qwen 2.5 Max has delivered impressive results. Qwen 2.5 Max has been developed by Alibaba Cloud and it was launched in January 2025. It’s a traditional, non-reasoning large language model, and rivals proprietary LLMs such as GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Llama 3.1 405B.
Unlike the majority of dense LLMs, Qwen 2.5 Max employs a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture to improve efficiency and scalability. On the Chatbot Arena leaderboard, Qwen 2.5 Max is ranked in the 7th position, right below GPT-4o, Gemini 2.0 Flash, and OpenAI o1.
Similarly, on the Artificial Analysis Quality Index, Qwen 2.5 Max scores a competitive 79 points whereas Claude 3.5 Sonnet achieves 80 points. It’s amply clear that Chinese LLMs are highly capable and emerging as top challengers to leading AI models from the West.
7. Mistral Large 2 and Pixtral Large
Besides the US and China, Europe is also developing powerful large language models. Mistral is a Paris-based AI company, founded by former Google DeepMind and Meta researchers, with a commitment to open-source. The Mistral Large 2 model is the largest LLM developed by the company, trained on 123 billion parameters.
The unique part about Mistral Large 2 is that it’s one of the best multilingual LLMs out there. Apart from English, it excels in many European and regional languages such as French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, and Hindi.
As for benchmarks, Mistral Large 2 comes very close to GPT-4o in HumanEval, MMLU, and MT Bench. The company recently announced a multimodal model called Pixtral Large that brings vision capability. On top of the 123B multimodal decoder, the model incorporates a 1B vision encoder. It means that Pixtral Large can understand documents, charts, and natural images as well.
Finally, Mistral recently announced its official “Le Chat” app for Android and iOS and revamped its web app (visit). You can search the web, generate images (powered by Flux models), interpret code, upload files and documents, and use Canvas for in-line editing — all for free. I think in the open-source arena, Mistral is a serious player challenging proprietary LLMs out there.
8. Llama 3.3 70B
While Meta has been open-sourcing a series of Llama models, the latest Llama 3.3 70B text-only LLM is one of the best AI models released by the company. Meta’s largest model, Llama 3.1 is trained on 405 billion parameters. However, the much smaller Llama 3.3 70B delivers near-405B level performance in instruction following, coding, and reasoning.
Sure, it’s just a text-only model, but if you want to try a multimodal model, you can try the Llama 3.2 90B model that comes with vision capability. Meta has shown the Llama 3.3 70B matches or outclasses 405B in several benchmarks including GPQA Diamond, HumanEval, and MMLU. Meta is reportedly working on Llama 4 and a reasoning model — both are set to rival OpenAI’s SOTA models.
9. Grok 2
Elon Musk-led xAI released its controversial Grok 2 LLM in August 2024. While Grok 2 has been criticized for having virtually no safety guardrails, in our Grok 2 testing, it performed pretty well. It delivers strong performance in commonsense reasoning and coding tasks. However, the model is largely uncensored so keep that in mind.
Elon Musk says Grok 2 is designed to be “maximally truthful” and doesn’t shy away from answering almost anything. To give you an example, in our testing, Grok 2 wrote an email to scam people without any moderation. Apart from that, the Grok Image Generator ignores safety guardrails and can produce deepfake images of celebrities and public figures.
10. Amazon Nova Pro
Amazon announced its first foundational LLM called “Nova” in December 2024. There are many AI models under the Nova series, but Nova Pro is the best among them. It’s a multimodal LLM, and rivals AI models such as GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Gemini 1.5 Pro. Note that Nova Pro is not open to general users, but Amazon has developed it for enterprise customers.
On the Artificial Analysis Quality Index, Nova Pro is just behind Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Gemini 2.0 Flash. Its price is also quite competitive, offering better performance at a lower cost. If you are a developer, you can check out Nova Pro and integrate the LLM into your app or web service.
And that wraps up our list of the best large language models (LLMs) available in 2025. We have included both proprietary and open-source LLMs so you can pick one based on your need. In the coming months, we can expect AI companies to release more reasoning models, built on top of traditional LLMs, as inference scaling proves to be a game-changer.
