cleverhack.com

OSS model release timeline ↴

The Urgency of Open Source AI

August 2025 (Updated October 2025)

Open source AI is transforming how we build, share, and utilize artificial intelligence. I believe in the power of open source to democratize technology.

Open Source Is For Us All

With open source AI, we can lower the barrier to entry, enabling developers, researchers, students, and other users globally to participate without requiring expensive infrastructure. Some may require data sovereignty, or they have use cases which would benefit from fine-tuning, or may they work within regulated industries. These practitioners might be the ones to build the next startup, identify a critical vulnerability, or adapt AI for their specific needs.

The Magic of Transparency

What happens when the broader community can examine architectures, training data, and outputs? We accelerate AI advancement.

In contrast, in non-open AI, information may remain siloed. One team may discover a training method that reduces costs by 90% and only they benefit. In open source, knowledge is shared. This is the difference between isolated groups and a collaborative future.

Our Open Source AI Advocates

For AI builders, Hugging Face has acted as educators and supporters, tirelessly encouraging the community to contribute to and develop open source AI.

For the greater industry, the Open Source Initiative has worked to define Open Source AI. They describe open source AI as making the entire AI stack (model code, weights, training recipes) fully accessible with open licensing. The freedom to use, study, modify, and share.

Why This Matters

Having open models, data, and code enables hands-on experimentation and building while encouraging this emerging generation of AI professionals.

When everyone can improve upon AI systems, we create something innovative, trustworthy, and aligned with humanity's diverse needs.

This is a future we should be moving toward together.

Recent Major Open Source Model Release Timeline

October 2025

- MiniMax MiniMax-M2 (October 2025) – It's a compact, fast, and cost-effective MoE model (230 billion total parameters with 10 billion active parameters) built for elite performance in coding and agentic tasks, all while maintaining powerful general intelligence. At only 8% of the price of Claude Sonnet and twice the speed. Released under a MIT license.
🔗: https://huggingface.co/MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-M2

- ServiceNow Apriel-1.5-15b-Thinker (October 2025) – A multimodal reasoning model in ServiceNow’s Apriel SLM series which achieves competitive performance against models 10 times it's size. Released under a MIT license.
🔗: https://huggingface.co/ServiceNow-AI/Apriel-1.5-15b-Thinker

- IBM Granite 4.0 (October 2025) – A new era for IBM’s family of enterprise-ready large language models, leveraging novel architectural advancements to enable small, efficient language models that provide competitive performance at reduced costs and latency. Multilingual and developed with a particular emphasis on essential tasks for agentic workflows. Released under an Apache 2.0 license.
🔗: https://huggingface.co/collections/ibm-granite/granite-40-language-models-6811a18b820ef362d9e5a82c

September 2025

- Z.ai GLM-4.6 (September 2025) – This latest model features a longer context window, superior coding performance, advanced reasoning, more capable agents, and refined writing versus GLM-4.5. Released under a MIT license.
🔗: https://huggingface.co/zai-org/GLM-4.6

- Alibaba Qwen3-Omni (September 2025) – A native end-to-end multilingual omni-modal SOTA foundation model family. Processes text, images, audio, and video, and delivers real-time streaming responses in both text and natural speech. Supports 119 text languages, 19 speech input languages, and 10 speech output languages. Released under an Apache 2.0 license.
🔗: https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct

- MBZUAI & G42 K2-Think (September 2025) – K2-Think is a 32 billion parameter open-weights general reasoning model with strong performance in competitive mathematical problem solving. This model is the result of a joint effort between the Institute of Foundation Models at Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) and G42. Released under an Apache 2.0 License.
🔗: https://huggingface.co/LLM360/K2-Think

- Swiss AI Initative Apertus (September 2025) – Apertus is a fully-open 70B and 8B parameter language model supporting over 1000 global languages (including Swiss German and Romansh), long context, using only fully compliant and open training data, all while achieving comparable performance to models trained behind closed doors. Released under an Apache 2.0 License.
🔗: https://huggingface.co/swiss-ai/Apertus-70B-2509

August 2025

- Meituan LongCat-Flash-Chat (August 2025) – A non-thinking foundation model that delivers highly competitive performance, with exceptional strengths in agentic tasks. Released under a MIT license.
🔗: https://huggingface.co/meituan-longcat/LongCat-Flash-Chat

- Nous Research Hermes 4 (August 2025) – Frontier, steerable, open, hybrid reasoning 405b and 70b model variants based on Meta's Llama-3.1. Strong performance in math, coding, STEM, and creativity. Released under a Llama 3 Community License.
🔗: https://hermes4.nousresearch.com/

- Cohere Labs Command A Reasoning (August 2025) – An open weights research release of a 111 billion parameter model optimized for tool use, agentic, and multilingual use cases with reasoning capabilities. Released under a CC-BY-NC-4.0 license.
🔗: https://huggingface.co/CohereLabs/command-a-reasoning-08-2025

- DeepSeek DeepSeek-V3.1 (August 2025) – Combines earlier V3 and R1 models into a hybrid thinking/non-thinking reasoning model with improved tool use and agentic capabilities. Released under a MIT license.
🔗: https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3.1-Base

- ByteDance Seed-OSS (August 2025) – A series of open-source LLMs designed for long-context, reasoning, agent, and general capabilities with developer-friendly features. Seed-OSS achieves excellent performance on several popular open benchmarks. Released under an Apache 2.0 license.
🔗: https://huggingface.co/ByteDance-Seed/Seed-OSS-36B-Instruct

- NVIDIA Nemotron-Nano-9B-v2 (August 2025) – New small, open model for enterprises with toggle on/off reasoning and open weights, open datasets, and training techniques. Released under the NVIDIA Open Model license.
🔗: https://huggingface.co/blog/nvidia/supercharge-ai-reasoning-with-nemotron-nano-2

- Google Gemma 3 270M (August 2025) – A compact, 270-million parameter model designed for task-specific fine-tuning with strong instruction-following and text structuring capabilities already trained in. Released under the Gemma license.
🔗: https://developers.googleblog.com/en/introducing-gemma-3-270m/

- OpenAI gpt-oss-120B and gpt-oss-20B (August 2025) – Open-weight AI models designed for powerful reasoning, agentic tasks, and versatile developer use cases. Ability to fine-tune. Released under an Apache 2.0 license.
🔗: https://huggingface.co/openai/gpt-oss-120b

July 2025

- Z.ai GLM-4.5 (July 2025) – The GLM-4.5 series models are foundation models designed for intelligent agents. Blog post with benchmarks. Released under a MIT license.
🔗: https://huggingface.co/zai-org/GLM-4.5

- Moonshot AI Kimi-K2-Instruct (July 2025) – Kimi K2 is a state-of-the-art mixture-of-experts (MoE) language model. Performs across frontier knowledge, reasoning, and coding tasks while optimized for agentic capabilities. Released with a modified-MIT license.
🔗: https://huggingface.co/moonshotai/Kimi-K2-Instruct

- StepFun AI Step3 (July 2025) – Step3 is a cutting-edge multimodal reasoning model—built on a Mixture-of-Experts architecture with 321B total parameters and 38B active. Released with an Apache 2.0 license.
🔗: https://huggingface.co/stepfun-ai/step3

- Alibaba Qwen3-Coder (July 2025) – Agentic code model with tool calling, available in multiple sizes. Released under an Apache 2.0 license.
🔗: https://qwenlm.github.io/blog/qwen3/

- Mistral Large 2 (July 2025) – Dense 123B-parameter multilingual model optimized for single-node inference; released under a research/restricted license that allows research use with commercial deployment requiring separate licensing.
🔗: https://mistral.ai/news/mistral-large-2407

June 2025

- Magistral Small (June 2025) – Mistral’s open-weight reasoning model focused on transparent logical reasoning. Released under an Apache 2.0 license.
🔗: https://mistral.ai/news/magistral

- MiniMax MiniMax-M1 (June 2025) – The world's first open-weight, large-scale hybrid-attention reasoning model. Released under an Apache 2.0 license.
🔗: https://huggingface.co/MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-M1-80k

May 2025

- NVIDIA Llama-3.3-Nemotron-Super-49B-v1 (May 2025) – This LLM is a derivative of Meta Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct (AKA the reference model). It is a reasoning model that is post trained for reasoning, human chat preferences, and tasks, such as RAG and tool calling. Released under the NVIDIA Open Model license.
🔗: https://huggingface.co/nvidia/Llama-3_3-Nemotron-Super-49B-v1

- DeepSeek-R1-0528 (May 2025) – Chinese reasoning model with improved complex reasoning and reduced hallucinations. Released under a MIT license.
🔗: https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1-0528

April 2025

- Meta Llama 4 (April 2025) – Introduces a mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture for efficiency and capability scaling; distributed as open-weight with nuanced source-available terms, making its openness debated.
🔗: https://ai.meta.com/blog/llama-4-multimodal-intelligence/

- Alibaba Qwen3 (April 2025) – Hybrid dense and MoE reasoning model family aimed at deep reasoning and multimodal tasks; positioned as open-weight/open-source, refer to individual model licensing.
🔗: https://qwenlm.github.io/blog/qwen3/

- IBM Granite 3.3 (April 2025) – Enterprise-focused models with enhanced reasoning and deployment transparency; released under an Apache 2.0 license.
🔗: https://huggingface.co/collections/ibm-granite/granite-33-language-models-67f65d0cca24bcbd1d3a08e3

March 2025

- DeepSeek-V3 (March 2025) – DeepSeek-V3 is a strong Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language model. Released under a MIT license.
🔗: https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3

- Mistral Small 3.1 / instruction-tuned variant (March 2025) – Efficient 24B-parameter instruction-tuned model with strong generative capabilities; released under an Apache 2.0 license.
🔗: https://huggingface.co/mistralai/Mistral-Small-24B-Instruct-2501

- Cohere Labs Command-A (March 2025) – Cohere Labs Command A is an open weights research release of a 111 billion parameter model optimized for enterprises. Released under a CC-BY-NC-4.0 license.
🔗: https://huggingface.co/CohereLabs/c4ai-command-a-03-2025

- Google Gemma 3 (March 2025) – Open-weight multilingual and vision-language family (1B–27B sizes) with structured output focus; publicly distributed with usage guardrails. This model can run on a single GPU or TPU. Released under a Gemma license.
🔗: https://blog.google/technology/developers/gemma-3/

January 2025

- DeepSeek-R1 (January 2025) – DeepSeek-R1 achieves performance comparable to OpenAI-o1 across math, code, and reasoning tasks. Released under a MIT license.
🔗: https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1

Previous Notable Releases

- BLOOM (176B, original 2022 release; community updates ongoing) – Multilingual model from the BigScience project; open-access with a Responsible AI–style license encouraging ethical usage.
🔗: https://bigscience.huggingface.co/blog/bloom

- Stable Diffusion variants (2024–2025) – Community-driven open-weight image generation models (e.g., Stable Diffusion 3 and SDXL Lightning) with publicly released weights and tooling; licensing and availability vary across submodels.
🔗: https://stability.ai/news/stable-diffusion-3

Open Source License Definitions

[MIT] MIT License – OSI-approved permissive open-source license allowing modification, redistribution, and commercial use with attribution.

[Apache] Apache 2.0 – OSI-approved permissive open-source license with patent grant and wide reuse rights.

[CC-BY-NC-4.0] CC-BY-NC-4.0 – A Creative Commons license that allows others to share and adapt a work, but only for non-commercial purposes and with proper attribution to the original creator.

[Open-weight / source-available] Trained weights are publicly shared, but associated code or terms may impose limitations; the line between fully open source and source-available is debated.

[Research/restricted] Limited to research/non-commercial use unless additional commercial licensing is obtained.

[Responsible AI–style] Access coupled with normative guidance on usage; not a standard OSI license.

[Community/open-weight ecosystem] Projects like Stable Diffusion combine public weights with community tooling; specific submodels may vary in terms.

Open Source AI Definitions

[Open Source AI] The Open Source Foundation's version 1.0 definition of Open Source AI.

[Open Weights] A discussion about Open Weights from the Open Source Foundation.

Open Source AI Leaderboards

[Artificial Analysis] LLM Leaderboard - Open Source

[Interconnects] Ranking the Chinese Open Model Builders - August 2025

[LMArena.ai] October 2025: Top 10 Open Models by Provider (Text)

[LMArena.ai] September 2025: Top 10 Open Models by Provider (Text)

[LMArena.ai] August 2025: Top 10 Open Models by Provider (Text)

Additional Open Source AI Resources

[Loïck BOURDOIS] Model statistics of the 50 most downloaded entities on Hugging Face - October 2025

[Nathan Lambert, et al.] Twitter thread about major open source model milestones - October 2025

[The Economist] China is quietly upstaging America with its open models - August 2025

[The ATOM Project] A new initiative to reinvigorate AI research in the U.S. by building leading, open models. More info.

[Chinese LLM Community] A Hugging Face community tracking open source Chinese LLM releases by month.

Menu	About The Author	More AI Writing
⇒ HOME ⇒ ABOUT	Joy Larkin is a technologist in Silicon Valley. She likes robots and is excited for Superintelligence. LinkedIn: /in/joylarkin ◦◦◦ Twitter: @joy	The Great Frontier AI Lab Product War Is Just Beginning Frontier AI Lab Tracker