2025 saw significant growth in open source AI models, particularly from Chinese labs like DeepSeek, Qwen, and Moonshot AI's Kimi K2. These models now rival proprietary options like ChatGPT while offering cost control and on-premises deployment. The landscape includes model families of various sizes (from 0.5B to 1T parameters) for different use cases: Qwen for versatility, Kimi K2 for agentic workflows and coding, OpenAI's gpt-oss for tool calling, and small language models for edge devices. Enterprise adoption is growing in regulated sectors requiring data sovereignty. Tools like Ollama, RamaLama, and vLLM make deployment accessible, from local hardware to production Kubernetes environments.
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Leading to 2025: The pre-DeepSeek landscapeThe highest-performing open modelsReal-world use cases for open modelsHow to run these models on your own hardwareWrapping up1 Comment
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