SourceScore

Topic hub · 41 claims

LLM releases 2024–2025 — frontier and open-weight catalog

The frontier-model releases that defined 2024 and the first half of 2025. Hand-verified release dates with model cards and official announcements.

The frontier-model release cadence

From 2023 to 2025 the frontier-model release cadence accelerated from quarterly to monthly. Every major lab shipped multiple iterations: OpenAI's GPT-4 → 4-Turbo → 4o → o-series; Anthropic's Claude 3 family → 3.5 family → Opus 4; Google's Gemini Pro → 1.5 Pro → Ultra → 2.0; Meta's Llama 2 → 3 → 3.1 → 3.2 → 3.3. The pace produced two problems: (1) developers couldn't track which model was current; (2) blog posts went stale in weeks. This hub is the canonical reference.

The open-weight wave

2024 was the year open-weight models reached frontier parity for many tasks. Llama 3.1 405B (Meta 2024-07), Mistral Large (Mistral 2024), Qwen 2.5 (Alibaba 2024), DeepSeek V3 (DeepSeek 2024-12), DeepSeek-R1 (DeepSeek 2025-01), Phi-4 (Microsoft 2024-12), Gemma (Google 2024). Each release came with model card, official blog post, and Hugging Face deployment — citable primary sources, not just speculation.

Reasoning models — the new axis

DeepSeek-R1 (January 2025) demonstrated that reinforcement-learning-trained reasoning models could match much larger conventional models on math + code benchmarks. OpenAI's o1 + o3 series brought test-time compute scaling. The trend redefined what "capable model" means: not just parameter count, but inference-time reasoning budget.

Defined terms (3)

Frontier model
A language model representing the current state of the art for general-purpose capabilities at its release date.
Open-weight model
A model whose trained weights are publicly downloadable. May or may not include training data + training code.
Reasoning model
A model trained to produce extended chain-of-thought before its final answer, often with RL-tuned reasoning rewards. DeepSeek-R1, OpenAI o1/o3 are examples.

All claims in this topic (41)

Related

Framework integrations