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GenAI Model 102 - Open Source Models

Open source models are available publicly without charge. This includes the important weights file and some documentation.

Open source models can usually be download and run locally. For example, here are this most popular models as of February 2025 on Ollama, a popular tool for downloading and running models locally.

Here is the current full list

The most popular open-source models

The most popular open-source, or at least open-weight models, are:

• Llama series from Meta
• Gemma from Google Deep Mind are small, fast, and optimized for local deployment
• Deepseek form the company of the same name: performance compares with Open AI’s reasoning models but was built at a fraction of the price
• phi4 from Microsoft
• QWEN from Alibaba

Open-weight and open-source are not exactly the same. For an open-weight model:

• the weights files are available
• we can download and use the models freely
• fine-tuning is allowed: we can customize them for specific tasks.
• there may be some commercial use restrictions, especially for large-scale commercial applications.