Technology

Open source LLM

Open Source LLMs (Large Language Models) deliver transparent, customizable AI, challenging proprietary models with performance from 7B to 141B parameters.

Open Source LLMs are foundation models (weights and code often public) offering complete control for commercial and research applications. Key players like Meta's Llama and Mistral AI's Mixtral 8x22B (141B total parameters) have closed the performance gap on proprietary systems. Developers leverage these models for specific use cases: for example, DeepSeek Coder V2 excels at code generation, while Google's Gemma 2 (27B) targets efficient on-device deployment. The permissive Apache 2.0 license is common, enabling deep customization and deployment for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and complex agentic workflows, bypassing vendor lock-in.