Open Source LLM Vs. Closed-Source LLM

Do you know the difference?

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AI is rapidly transforming our lives and is increasingly becoming an integral part of how we search for information, learn things, and, in general, do our day-to-day work. A recent survey mentioned that 52% of US adults use large language models.

If you use LLMs like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude frequently, you need to clearly understand the difference between Open-source and Closed-source AI models.

Are you looking for data security for your sensitive data, or do you want the AI system to be transparent and explainable?

Open Source AI Models

• Llama 4 Maverick and Llama 4 Scout by Meta is a multimodal AI that can process text, images, audio, and videos.
• Mistral is an advanced reasoning, multilingual tasks, math, and code generation LLM.
• DeepSeek-R1 by a Chinese Startup is a reasoning model trained with significantly lower cost than other leading LLMs.
• Qwen 2.5 is a reasoning LLM by Alibaba that supports multimodal(text, images) inputs, reduces resource usage, and speeds up inference time.

Closed-Source AI Models

• ChatGPT by OpenAI has released o3 and o4-mini models as of this article's writing, and GPT-5 is…