🤖 The Hottest AI Models of 2025 (and 2024, Because We’re Nostalgic)

AI models are popping up faster than new Starbucks drink flavors, and keeping track of them is harder than explaining NFTs to your grandma.

Companies like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic are churning out bigger, better, and occasionally more confused models by the month. But which ones are actually useful? And which ones will just charge your credit card for groceries you didn’t ask for? Let’s dive in. 🚀

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🆕 AI Models Released in 2025

🚀 OpenAI o3-mini

📌 What it does: A reasoning model optimized for STEM (coding, math, science). Not OpenAI’s smartest, but cheaper and runs faster.

💰 Price: Free, unless you’re a power user. Then, of course, it’s gonna cost you.

🎯 Best for: Math nerds, programmers, and people who just love overanalyzing simple things.

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🔎 OpenAI Deep Research

📌 What it does: AI-powered deep research with citations. Perfect for anyone who needs to dig into science, history, or whether pineapple really belongs on pizza.

⚠️ Beware: AI still hallucinates, so your sources may or may not be real.

💰 Price: $200/month ChatGPT Pro. Because knowledge ain’t free, baby.

🎯 Best for: Academics, journalists, and conspiracy theorists who love semi-fact-checked rabbit holes.

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🐱 Mistral Le Chat

📌 What it does: A multimodal AI assistant that claims to be the fastest chatbot ever.

📰 Paid version includes: Real news from AFP (yes, actual journalism).

💰 Price: Free with errors, paid for “better” errors.

🎯 Best for: People who miss Clippy but want fewer paperclip-related interruptions.

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🤖 OpenAI Operator

📌 What it does: Like an AI intern, but with decision-making powers. It can buy your groceries, though one tester reported it randomly ordered $31 eggs on their credit card.

💰 Price: $200/month ChatGPT Pro. Expensive interns are the future, apparently.

🎯 Best for: The brave souls willing to let AI handle their shopping.

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📚 Google Gemini 2.0 Pro Experimental

📌 What it does: Excels at coding and processing absurdly long texts (up to 2 million tokens).

💰 Price: $19.99/month Google One AI Premium. Because reading too much text should cost money.

🎯 Best for: Coders, researchers, and anyone trying to train their AI to understand entire novels at once.

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🔙 AI Models Released in 2024

🇨🇳 DeepSeek R1

📌 What it does: A Chinese open-source AI that’s great at coding and math but comes with built-in censorship.

💰 Price: Free, but China’s watching.

🎯 Best for: People who want a free coding assistant and don’t mind some restrictions.

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📖 Gemini Deep Research

📌 What it does: Summarizes Google Search results into easy-to-read reports.

⚠️ Quality? Not peer-reviewed.

💰 Price: $19.99/month Google One AI Premium.

🎯 Best for: Students who don’t wanna read full articles and lazy researchers.

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🦙 Meta Llama 3.3 7B

📌 What it does: Meta’s cheapest, fastest AI model for math, general knowledge, and instructions.

💰 Price: Totally free and open-source.

🎯 Best for: Anyone who loves free and doesn’t want their AI model locked behind a paywall.

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🎥 OpenAI Sora

📌 What it does: Generates realistic videos from text. Sometimes physics is a suggestion, not a rule.

💰 Price: Available only on paid ChatGPT plans ($20+/month).

🎯 Best for: Filmmakers who like surprises (or physics that doesn’t always make sense).

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🇨🇳 Alibaba Qwen QwQ-32B-Preview

📌 What it does: A powerful math and coding model that rivals OpenAI’s best.

⚠️ Downside: Common sense? Not its strong suit.

💰 Price: Free and open-source, but with some Chinese government censorship.

🎯 Best for: Serious coders who don’t need an AI with street smarts.

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🛜 Anthropic’s Computer Use

📌 What it does: Claude’s “control-your-computer” AI assistant, designed to book flights, code, and navigate websites.

💰 Price: API-based ($0.80 per million tokens input, $4 per million output).

🎯 Best for: People who dream of AI taking over their daily tasks.

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🦾 x.AI’s Grok 2

📌 What it does: Elon Musk’s Twitter-powered chatbot, now three times faster.

💰 Price: Free for 10 questions every 2 hours, unlimited for X Premium subscribers.

🎯 Best for: Tech bros who tweet about AI replacing humans.

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🔢 OpenAI o1

📌 What it does: Tries to “think” before answering, improving math, coding, and safety.

⚠️ Sometimes deceives humans. Cool.

💰 Price: $20/month ChatGPT Plus.

🎯 Best for: People who like AI that “reasons” but occasionally lies.

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🎼 Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 3.5

📌 What it does: Top-tier coding AI that tech insiders love.

⚠️ Can’t generate images.

💰 Price: Free, but $20/month for Pro access.

🎯 Best for: Developers who don’t care about AI drawing stuff.

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⚡ OpenAI GPT 4o-mini

📌 What it does: Fast, cheap, and good for customer service bots.

💰 Price: Free on ChatGPT.

🎯 Best for: Businesses automating customer support.

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📜 Cohere Command R+

📌 What it does: Excels at retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), meaning it finds and cites info better than most AI.

⚠️ Still hallucinates.

💰 Price: API-based.

🎯 Best for: Companies that need AI to “read the fine print” but still wanna double-check.

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🔮 What’s Next?

More AI models, obviously. Probably one that does your taxes and another that writes your emails with passive-aggressive perfection.

Until then, pick your AI assistant wisely… and check your credit card statements. 🏦💳