The tech industry faced something of a reckoning in late 2022 with the arrival of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a simple chatbot that could answer questions, seemingly by magic.
The early frontier large language models (LLMs) from OpenAI and rivals like Anthropic and Google could reason, solve problems, and answer detailed queries put to them using natural language. But no one knew exactly what was in the LLM black boxes underpinning the services.
Soon, AI models such as Meta’s Llama and Mistral came along to break the proprietary AI monopoly. These kinds of models could be freely downloaded and modified to fit specific applications.
In late 2024, Chinese firm DeepSeek released V3, an open model reportedly trained at a fraction of the cost US frontier labs spent. A reasoning model, R1, followed in January 2025 and was seen as a legitimate threat to frontier models.
During the last year, open models such as Alibaba’s Qwen and Moonshot’s Kimi have also been gaining ground among enterprises for reasoning, agentic and physical AI. “The result is a clear trend: with each generation, open-source models take half as long to catch up to the first closed-source model of the era,” research firm SemiAnalysis explained in a newsletter this month.
