
Turns out, there are a lot more models out there than I realized
Models That impressed me & use them in Day to day basis are –
- Kimi K2 Thinking: strong reasoning and chain-of-thought model; performs well on analytical writing and Q&A.
- GLM 4.6: very balanced model for multilingual and academic tasks, with a solid open-source ecosystem.
- Qwen 3 Coder / Qwen 3.5: outstanding open models for programming and data-centric use. Cost-efficient and surprisingly accurate.
- Claude Sonnet 4.5: excels at summarization, safe reasoning, and complex document analysis. Perfect for enterprise or multi-file tasks
- GPT-5: unmatched in reasoning, code debugging, and long-context understanding. Great for research, writing, and structured workflows.
What surprised me most wasn’t the differences. it was the parallels. For almost every closed model, there’s an open-source counterpart catching up fast:
- Sonnet 4.5 → GLM 4.6 / Minimax M2
- Grok Code Fast → GPT-OSS 120B / Qwen 3 Coder
- GPT-5 → Kimi K2 / Kimi K2 Thinking
- Gemini 2.5 Flash → Qwen 2.5 Image
- Gemini 2.5 Pro → Qwen 3-235-A22B
- Sonnet 4 → Qwen 3 Coder
These were my Go to Models for my Daily usecase be it Coding, general purpose tasks. I would suggest to Try out different OpenSource models apart from the closed source models. It can be a bit overwhelming to try All. Try LiteLLM if you want to Host & use Multiple LLM models your self Or Anannas (0.48ms latency) or OpenRouter (40ms latency) Provider, to connect Multiple OpenSource Models within one API.
I prefer Trying new models as soon as they arrive. would like to hear more thoughts on this as well.
