The defining strategy of 2025 was not to choose a single “best major language model.” It was putting together a pile. Claude for premium coding and editing. DeepSeek or Qwen for cheap volume. Muse for fiction. Dolphin if restrictions were more important than polish.
Models are no longer personalities this year. They became instruments. The benefit went to users who treated them that way.
The technology grew into something actually useful by 2025: models became smarter, cheaper and specialized for specific tasks. The era of chasing one ‘best’ model was over.
Here’s a look at which models have earned their place in our stack.
Coding
Vibe coding, the ability to create AI code with simple instructions, was super hyped in 2025. These are the best models for both vibe coders and real programmers who use tools for AI-assisted coding.
The best
For teams that needed a coding model they could rely on without having to babysit, Claude Opus 4.5 stood out. Anthropic reports a score of 80.9% on SWE-bench Verified, and in practice the model matched that reputation: strong reasoning, low hallucination rates, and a conservative style that makes it suitable for production environments.
The trade-off is cost and context efficiency. Opus is expensive and long sessions can quickly burn through the context window. For professional developers who delivered real software, that was often acceptable. This was often not the case with regular or exploratory coding.
Best value
Chinese startup DeepSeek V3.2 costs $0.28 per million input tokens, making it extremely cheaper compared to its Western counterparts. The model also comes with MIT licensed weights for V3.2 projects, giving teams full ownership and modification rights.
Deepseek has released a “Special” version that is even better at this. However, it is only available via API.
Agent tasks
AI that can do everything for you without you guiding them and overseeing every step: that is the promise of agentic AI.
These models perform multi-step workflows, website browsing, and recovery from execution errors. The agent category emerged as the defining battleground of 2025.
The best
OpenAI’s GPT-5.2 “Thinking” model leads here with 80% on SWE benchmark Verified, in addition to explicit positioning around end-to-end execution and tool-calling performance. The model intelligently switches between quick responses and deep reasoning depending on the complexity of the task, making it ideal for workflows that actually need to be completed rather than just started.
Best value
MiniMax M2’s efficiency profile makes it particularly attractive to companies using interactive agents at scale. The sparse MoE architecture means lower latency and higher throughput for batch sampling, exactly what customer support automation and R&D workflows need.
With prices around $0.01 per 1K tokens (significantly lower than frontier models), companies can afford to deploy it across entire departments for tasks like knowledge base queries, automated research summaries, and document processing without worrying about runaway costs.
NVIDIA’s Nemotron 3 family of models, released on December 15, brings hybrid Mamba-Transformer architecture to consumer GPUs. It’s a super new model family that’s worth keeping an eye on.
Chatbots
These are the models that are a great all-rounder: versatile, knowledgeable and cheap enough to talk to you for a long time
The best
GPT-5.2 remains the most complete option. It maintains a 60.5% market share and approximately 800 million weekly active users, with one killer feature that competitors still lack: memory. The model remembers previous conversations and builds relationships with users over time, eliminating repetitive context setting.
OpenAI also made this model more accessible to the GPT-4o cult, which demanded the company bring back that old model. In theory, this should have the power of GPT-5 with the ‘humanity’ of GPT-4o
Best value
Alibaba’s Qwen 2.5 became the basis for 40% of new refined models worldwide. It supports multiple languages and features an Apache 2.0 license that allows unlimited commercial use. Organizations can align with internal documents and deploy locally without sending data to third-party APIs. It’s also open source (meaning users can train, tweak, and use it for free if they have the hardware) and comes in a variety of sizes and flavors
Creative writing
2025 was the year when AIs were measured by the complexity of the logical tasks they solved. But when it comes to creativity, imagination and art, things are a lot more complicated. The jump in quality may not be as big as in the other areas, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t models for these types of users.
The best
Based purely on numbers, OpenAI’s GPT-5 Pro scores 8,474 on the Lechmazur Writing Benchmark V4, the highest score for any LLM. It also requires some deep pockets, with the subscription costing $200 per month.
You might want to give it a try if you really want to, but for most guys, that $200 would be better spent elsewhere. In our opinion, LLMs aren’t really great at creative writing – and AI companies don’t seem too concerned about this.
Best value
Sudowrite’s Muse model is another great model for creative writers because it’s built specifically for fiction. Muse offers narrative engineering pipelines that ensure chapters stay on track without meandering, although it is exclusive to the Sudowrite platform and less filtered for adult themes than the mainstream alternative.
Best open source alternative
That said, for long stories we’d still recommend the age-old ‘Longwriter’ from 2024. It’s not the best by any means, but it is capable of producing pages and pages of creative content in one go. Use it to quickly build a base and then add it to the model of your choice to refine the chapters or work on the details, twist the story, etc.
Uncensored and NSFW
Do you need an AI to help you with your next Hellraiser script? Want to get kinky with your AI? Then you need an uncensored model… and boy, forget big tech for this. This category is not about intelligence. If you really need uncensored AI writing, you need to consider the inherent limitations of the models. And the best option is going local
To be fair, any destroyed version of an open source model should suffice. When a model is destroyed, it essentially loses its ability to reject outputs.
The best
The Dolphin models are a classic choice. The 70 billion parameter variant eliminates all safety restrictions through “alignment detox” training.
Worth noting: if you’re building locally on Meta’s Llama line, it’s not Apache: it’s under the Llama 3.3 Community License with its own terms and restrictions.
Qwq-abliterated is another really effective, uncensored refinement. The model is a refined version that has been specially designed to be as uncensored as a model can be.
Science, research and business
The best
Gemini 3 Pro’s 91.9% on GPQA Diamond and perfect 100% on AIME 2025 represent historic achievements in AI reasoning. Deep Think mode allows him to methodically solve complex scientific problems. The context of 10 million tokens allows researchers to upload entire articles and their references for comprehensive analysis.
Best value
If you value stability over breakthrough performance, Z.AI’s GLM-4.6 has established itself in a strong position. The open licensing under MIT gives companies the freedom to customize, self-host and refine their software without vendor lock-in or compliance restrictions. At around one-third the API cost of comparable Western models, it’s a good practical choice for high-volume internal tools.
Most versatile
Alibaba’s Qwen3 open weights allow researchers to study model behavior, tune it to specialized domains, and deploy it without API dependencies. Its multilingual capabilities make it particularly valuable for international research collaborations.
What makes this model special for business and science is that it offers the best research agent on the market for free when you use it on the official Qwen Chat platform.
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