Best Free Foundation Models - Page 2
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Compare the Top Free Foundation Models as of August 2026 - Page 2
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1
Mistral 7B
Mistral AI
Mistral 7B is a 7.3-billion-parameter language model that outperforms larger models like Llama 2 13B across various benchmarks. It employs Grouped-Query Attention (GQA) for faster inference and Sliding Window Attention (SWA) to efficiently handle longer sequences. Released under the Apache 2.0 license, Mistral 7B is accessible for deployment across diverse platforms, including local environments and major cloud services. Additionally, a fine-tuned version, Mistral 7B Instruct, demonstrates enhanced performance in instruction-following tasks, surpassing models like Llama 2 13B Chat.Starting Price: Free -
2
Codestral Mamba
Mistral AI
As a tribute to Cleopatra, whose glorious destiny ended in tragic snake circumstances, we are proud to release Codestral Mamba, a Mamba2 language model specialized in code generation, available under an Apache 2.0 license. Codestral Mamba is another step in our effort to study and provide new architectures. It is available for free use, modification, and distribution, and we hope it will open new perspectives in architecture research. Mamba models offer the advantage of linear time inference and the theoretical ability to model sequences of infinite length. It allows users to engage with the model extensively with quick responses, irrespective of the input length. This efficiency is especially relevant for code productivity use cases, this is why we trained this model with advanced code and reasoning capabilities, enabling it to perform on par with SOTA transformer-based models.Starting Price: Free -
3
Mistral NeMo
Mistral AI
Mistral NeMo, our new best small model. A state-of-the-art 12B model with 128k context length, and released under the Apache 2.0 license. Mistral NeMo is a 12B model built in collaboration with NVIDIA. Mistral NeMo offers a large context window of up to 128k tokens. Its reasoning, world knowledge, and coding accuracy are state-of-the-art in its size category. As it relies on standard architecture, Mistral NeMo is easy to use and a drop-in replacement in any system using Mistral 7B. We have released pre-trained base and instruction-tuned checkpoints under the Apache 2.0 license to promote adoption for researchers and enterprises. Mistral NeMo was trained with quantization awareness, enabling FP8 inference without any performance loss. The model is designed for global, multilingual applications. It is trained on function calling and has a large context window. Compared to Mistral 7B, it is much better at following precise instructions, reasoning, and handling multi-turn conversations.Starting Price: Free -
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Mixtral 8x22B
Mistral AI
Mixtral 8x22B is our latest open model. It sets a new standard for performance and efficiency within the AI community. It is a sparse Mixture-of-Experts (SMoE) model that uses only 39B active parameters out of 141B, offering unparalleled cost efficiency for its size. It is fluent in English, French, Italian, German, and Spanish. It has strong mathematics and coding capabilities. It is natively capable of function calling; along with the constrained output mode implemented on la Plateforme, this enables application development and tech stack modernization at scale. Its 64K tokens context window allows precise information recall from large documents. We build models that offer unmatched cost efficiency for their respective sizes, delivering the best performance-to-cost ratio within models provided by the community. Mixtral 8x22B is a natural continuation of our open model family. Its sparse activation patterns make it faster than any dense 70B model.Starting Price: Free -
5
Mathstral
Mistral AI
As a tribute to Archimedes, whose 2311th anniversary we’re celebrating this year, we are proud to release our first Mathstral model, a specific 7B model designed for math reasoning and scientific discovery. The model has a 32k context window published under the Apache 2.0 license. We’re contributing Mathstral to the science community to bolster efforts in advanced mathematical problems requiring complex, multi-step logical reasoning. The Mathstral release is part of our broader effort to support academic projects, it was produced in the context of our collaboration with Project Numina. Akin to Isaac Newton in his time, Mathstral stands on the shoulders of Mistral 7B and specializes in STEM subjects. It achieves state-of-the-art reasoning capacities in its size category across various industry-standard benchmarks. In particular, it achieves 56.6% on MATH and 63.47% on MMLU, with the following MMLU performance difference by subject between Mathstral 7B and Mistral 7B.Starting Price: Free -
6
Tülu 3
Ai2
Tülu 3 is an advanced instruction-following language model developed by the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2), designed to enhance capabilities in areas such as knowledge, reasoning, mathematics, coding, and safety. Built upon the Llama 3 Base, Tülu 3 employs a comprehensive four-stage post-training process: meticulous prompt curation and synthesis, supervised fine-tuning on a diverse set of prompts and completions, preference tuning using both off- and on-policy data, and a novel reinforcement learning approach to bolster specific skills with verifiable rewards. This open-source model distinguishes itself by providing full transparency, including access to training data, code, and evaluation tools, thereby closing the performance gap between open and proprietary fine-tuning methods. Evaluations indicate that Tülu 3 outperforms other open-weight models of similar size, such as Llama 3.1-Instruct and Qwen2.5-Instruct, across various benchmarks.Starting Price: Free -
7
Kimi K2
Moonshot AI
Kimi K2 is a state-of-the-art open source large language model series built on a mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture, featuring 1 trillion total parameters and 32 billion activated parameters for task-specific efficiency. Trained with the Muon optimizer on over 15.5 trillion tokens and stabilized by MuonClip’s attention-logit clamping, it delivers exceptional performance in frontier knowledge, reasoning, mathematics, coding, and general agentic workflows. Moonshot AI provides two variants, Kimi-K2-Base for research-level fine-tuning and Kimi-K2-Instruct pre-trained for immediate chat and tool-driven interactions, enabling both custom development and drop-in agentic capabilities. Benchmarks show it outperforms leading open source peers and rivals top proprietary models in coding tasks and complex task breakdowns, while its 128 K-token context length, tool-calling API compatibility, and support for industry-standard inference engines.Starting Price: Free -
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Kimi K2 Thinking
Moonshot AI
Kimi K2 Thinking is an advanced open source reasoning model developed by Moonshot AI, designed specifically for long-horizon, multi-step workflows where the system interleaves chain-of-thought processes with tool invocation across hundreds of sequential tasks. The model uses a mixture-of-experts architecture with a total of 1 trillion parameters, yet only about 32 billion parameters are activated per inference pass, optimizing efficiency while maintaining vast capacity. It supports a context window of up to 256,000 tokens, enabling the handling of extremely long inputs and reasoning chains without losing coherence. Native INT4 quantization is built in, which reduces inference latency and memory usage without performance degradation. Kimi K2 Thinking is explicitly built for agentic workflows; it can autonomously call external tools, manage sequential logic steps (up to and typically between 200-300 tool calls in a single chain), and maintain consistent reasoning.Starting Price: Free -
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Mistral Large 3
Mistral AI
Mistral Large 3 is a next-generation, open multimodal AI model built with a powerful sparse Mixture-of-Experts architecture featuring 41B active parameters out of 675B total. Designed from scratch on NVIDIA H200 GPUs, it delivers frontier-level reasoning, multilingual performance, and advanced image understanding while remaining fully open-weight under the Apache 2.0 license. The model achieves top-tier results on modern instruction benchmarks, positioning it among the strongest permissively licensed foundation models available today. With native support across vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, and major cloud providers, Mistral Large 3 offers exceptional accessibility and performance efficiency. Its design enables enterprise-grade customization, letting teams fine-tune or adapt the model for domain-specific workflows and proprietary applications. Mistral Large 3 represents a major advancement in open AI, offering frontier intelligence without sacrificing transparency or control.Starting Price: Free -
10
Kimi K2.5
Moonshot AI
Kimi K2.5 is a next-generation multimodal AI model designed for advanced reasoning, coding, and visual understanding tasks. It features a native multimodal architecture that supports both text and visual inputs, enabling image and video comprehension alongside natural language processing. Kimi K2.5 delivers open-source state-of-the-art performance in agent workflows, software development, and general intelligence tasks. The model offers ultra-long context support with a 256K token window, making it suitable for large documents and complex conversations. It includes long-thinking capabilities that allow multi-step reasoning and tool invocation for solving challenging problems. Kimi K2.5 is fully compatible with the OpenAI API format, allowing developers to switch seamlessly with minimal changes. With strong performance, flexibility, and developer-focused tooling, Kimi K2.5 is built for production-grade AI applications.Starting Price: Free -
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GLM-5
Zhipu AI
GLM-5 is Z.ai’s latest large language model built for complex systems engineering and long-horizon agentic tasks. It scales significantly beyond GLM-4.5, increasing total parameters and training data while integrating DeepSeek Sparse Attention to reduce deployment costs without sacrificing long-context capacity. The model combines enhanced pre-training with a new asynchronous reinforcement learning infrastructure called slime, improving training efficiency and post-training refinement. GLM-5 achieves best-in-class performance among open-source models across reasoning, coding, and agent benchmarks, narrowing the gap with leading frontier models. It ranks highly on evaluations such as Vending Bench 2, demonstrating strong long-term planning and operational capabilities. The model is open-sourced under the MIT License.Starting Price: Free -
12
GLM-5.1
Zhipu AI
GLM-5.1 is the latest iteration of Z.ai’s GLM series, designed as a frontier-level, agent-oriented AI model optimized for coding, reasoning, and long-horizon workflows. It builds on the GLM-5 architecture, which uses a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) design to deliver high performance while keeping inference costs efficient, and is part of a broader push toward open-weight, developer-accessible models. A core focus of GLM-5.1 is enabling agentic behavior, meaning it can plan, execute, and iterate across multi-step tasks rather than simply responding to single prompts. It is specifically designed to handle complex workflows such as debugging code, navigating repositories, and executing chained operations with sustained context. Compared to earlier models, GLM-5.1 improves reliability in long interactions, maintaining coherence across extended sessions and reducing breakdowns in multi-step reasoning.Starting Price: Free -
13
Kimi K2.6
Moonshot AI
Kimi K2.6 is a next-generation agentic AI model developed by Moonshot AI, designed to push forward real-world execution, coding, and multi-step reasoning beyond earlier K2 and K2.5 versions. It builds on a Mixture-of-Experts architecture and the multimodal, agent-first foundation of the Kimi series, combining language understanding, coding, and tool use into a single system capable of planning and executing complex workflows. It introduces deeper reasoning capabilities and significantly improved agent planning, allowing it to break down tasks, coordinate tools, and handle multi-file or multi-step problems with greater accuracy and efficiency. It supports advanced tool calling with high reliability, enabling integration with external systems such as web search or APIs, and includes built-in validation mechanisms to ensure correct execution formats.Starting Price: Free -
14
Mixtral 8x7B
Mistral AI
Mixtral 8x7B is a high-quality sparse mixture of experts model (SMoE) with open weights. Licensed under Apache 2.0. Mixtral outperforms Llama 2 70B on most benchmarks with 6x faster inference. It is the strongest open-weight model with a permissive license and the best model overall regarding cost/performance trade-offs. In particular, it matches or outperforms GPT-3.5 on most standard benchmarks.Starting Price: Free -
15
Llama 3
Meta
We’ve integrated Llama 3 into Meta AI, our intelligent assistant, that expands the ways people can get things done, create and connect with Meta AI. You can see first-hand the performance of Llama 3 by using Meta AI for coding tasks and problem solving. Whether you're developing agents, or other AI-powered applications, Llama 3 in both 8B and 70B will offer the capabilities and flexibility you need to develop your ideas. With the release of Llama 3, we’ve updated the Responsible Use Guide (RUG) to provide the most comprehensive information on responsible development with LLMs. Our system-centric approach includes updates to our trust and safety tools with Llama Guard 2, optimized to support the newly announced taxonomy published by MLCommons expanding its coverage to a more comprehensive set of safety categories, code shield, and Cybersec Eval 2.Starting Price: Free -
16
Codestral
Mistral AI
We introduce Codestral, our first-ever code model. Codestral is an open-weight generative AI model explicitly designed for code generation tasks. It helps developers write and interact with code through a shared instruction and completion API endpoint. As it masters code and English, it can be used to design advanced AI applications for software developers. Codestral is trained on a diverse dataset of 80+ programming languages, including the most popular ones, such as Python, Java, C, C++, JavaScript, and Bash. It also performs well on more specific ones like Swift and Fortran. This broad language base ensures Codestral can assist developers in various coding environments and projects.Starting Price: Free -
17
CodeQwen
Alibaba
CodeQwen is the code version of Qwen, the large language model series developed by the Qwen team, Alibaba Cloud. It is a transformer-based decoder-only language model pre-trained on a large amount of data of codes. Strong code generation capabilities and competitive performance across a series of benchmarks. Supporting long context understanding and generation with the context length of 64K tokens. CodeQwen supports 92 coding languages and provides excellent performance in text-to-SQL, bug fixes, etc. You can just write several lines of code with transformers to chat with CodeQwen. Essentially, we build the tokenizer and the model from pre-trained methods, and we use the generate method to perform chatting with the help of the chat template provided by the tokenizer. We apply the ChatML template for chat models following our previous practice. The model completes the code snippets according to the given prompts, without any additional formatting.Starting Price: Free -
18
Llama 3.1
Meta
The open source AI model you can fine-tune, distill and deploy anywhere. Our latest instruction-tuned model is available in 8B, 70B and 405B versions. Using our open ecosystem, build faster with a selection of differentiated product offerings to support your use cases. Choose from real-time inference or batch inference services. Download model weights to further optimize cost per token. Adapt for your application, improve with synthetic data and deploy on-prem or in the cloud. Use Llama system components and extend the model using zero shot tool use and RAG to build agentic behaviors. Leverage 405B high quality data to improve specialized models for specific use cases.Starting Price: Free -
19
Mistral Large
Mistral AI
Mistral Large is Mistral AI's flagship language model, designed for advanced text generation and complex multilingual reasoning tasks, including text comprehension, transformation, and code generation. It supports English, French, Spanish, German, and Italian, offering a nuanced understanding of grammar and cultural contexts. With a 32,000-token context window, it can accurately recall information from extensive documents. The model's precise instruction-following and native function-calling capabilities facilitate application development and tech stack modernization. Mistral Large is accessible through Mistral's platform, Azure AI Studio, and Azure Machine Learning, and can be self-deployed for sensitive use cases. Benchmark evaluations indicate that Mistral Large achieves strong results, making it the world's second-ranked model generally available through an API, next to GPT-4.Starting Price: Free -
20
IBM Granite
IBM
IBM® Granite™ is a family of artificial intelligence (AI) models purpose-built for business, engineered from scratch to help ensure trust and scalability in AI-driven applications. Open source Granite models are available today. We make AI as accessible as possible for as many developers as possible. That’s why we have open-sourced core Granite Code, Time Series, Language, and GeoSpatial models and made them available on Hugging Face under permissive Apache 2.0 license that enables broad, unencumbered commercial usage. All Granite models are trained on carefully curated data, with industry-leading levels of transparency about the data that went into them. We have also open-sourced the tools we use to ensure the data is high quality and up to the standards that enterprise-grade applications demand.Starting Price: Free -
21
Granite Code
IBM
We introduce the Granite series of decoder-only code models for code generative tasks (e.g., fixing bugs, explaining code, documenting code), trained with code written in 116 programming languages. A comprehensive evaluation of the Granite Code model family on diverse tasks demonstrates that our models consistently reach state-of-the-art performance among available open source code LLMs. The key advantages of Granite Code models include: All-rounder Code LLM: Granite Code models achieve competitive or state-of-the-art performance on different kinds of code-related tasks, including code generation, explanation, fixing, editing, translation, and more. Demonstrating their ability to solve diverse coding tasks. Trustworthy Enterprise-Grade LLM: All our models are trained on license-permissible data collected following IBM's AI Ethics principles and guided by IBM’s Corporate Legal team for trustworthy enterprise usage.Starting Price: Free -
22
Qwen2
Alibaba
Qwen2 is the large language model series developed by Qwen team, Alibaba Cloud. Qwen2 is a series of large language models developed by the Qwen team at Alibaba Cloud. It includes both base language models and instruction-tuned models, ranging from 0.5 billion to 72 billion parameters, and features both dense models and a Mixture-of-Experts model. The Qwen2 series is designed to surpass most previous open-weight models, including its predecessor Qwen1.5, and to compete with proprietary models across a broad spectrum of benchmarks in language understanding, generation, multilingual capabilities, coding, mathematics, and reasoning.Starting Price: Free -
23
Grok 2
SpaceXAI
Grok-2, the latest iteration in AI technology, is a marvel of modern engineering, designed to push the boundaries of what artificial intelligence can achieve. Inspired by the wit and wisdom of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the efficiency of JARVIS from Iron Man, Grok-2 is not just another AI; it's a companion in the truest sense. With an expanded knowledge base that stretches up to the recent past, Grok-2 offers insights with a touch of humor and an outside perspective on humanity, making it uniquely engaging. Its capabilities include answering nearly any question with maximum helpfulness, often providing solutions that are both innovative and outside the conventional box. Grok-2's design emphasizes truthfulness, avoiding the pitfalls of woke culture, and strives to be maximally truthful, making it a reliable source of information and entertainment in an increasingly complex world.Starting Price: Free -
24
Llama 3.2
Meta
The open-source AI model you can fine-tune, distill and deploy anywhere is now available in more versions. Choose from 1B, 3B, 11B or 90B, or continue building with Llama 3.1. Llama 3.2 is a collection of large language models (LLMs) pretrained and fine-tuned in 1B and 3B sizes that are multilingual text only, and 11B and 90B sizes that take both text and image inputs and output text. Develop highly performative and efficient applications from our latest release. Use our 1B or 3B models for on device applications such as summarizing a discussion from your phone or calling on-device tools like calendar. Use our 11B or 90B models for image use cases such as transforming an existing image into something new or getting more information from an image of your surroundings.Starting Price: Free -
25
Llama 3.3
Meta
Llama 3.3 is the latest iteration in the Llama series of language models, developed to push the boundaries of AI-powered understanding and communication. With enhanced contextual reasoning, improved language generation, and advanced fine-tuning capabilities, Llama 3.3 is designed to deliver highly accurate, human-like responses across diverse applications. This version features a larger training dataset, refined algorithms for nuanced comprehension, and reduced biases compared to its predecessors. Llama 3.3 excels in tasks such as natural language understanding, creative writing, technical explanation, and multilingual communication, making it an indispensable tool for businesses, developers, and researchers. Its modular architecture allows for customizable deployment in specialized domains, ensuring versatility and performance at scale.Starting Price: Free -
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Qwen2.5-Max
Alibaba
Qwen2.5-Max is a large-scale Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model developed by the Qwen team, pretrained on over 20 trillion tokens and further refined through Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). In evaluations, it outperforms models like DeepSeek V3 in benchmarks such as Arena-Hard, LiveBench, LiveCodeBench, and GPQA-Diamond, while also demonstrating competitive results in other assessments, including MMLU-Pro. Qwen2.5-Max is accessible via API through Alibaba Cloud and can be explored interactively on Qwen Chat.Starting Price: Free -
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Qwen2.5-VL
Alibaba
Qwen2.5-VL is the latest vision-language model from the Qwen series, representing a significant advancement over its predecessor, Qwen2-VL. This model excels in visual understanding, capable of recognizing a wide array of objects, including text, charts, icons, graphics, and layouts within images. It functions as a visual agent, capable of reasoning and dynamically directing tools, enabling applications such as computer and phone usage. Qwen2.5-VL can comprehend videos exceeding one hour in length and can pinpoint relevant segments within them. Additionally, it accurately localizes objects in images by generating bounding boxes or points and provides stable JSON outputs for coordinates and attributes. The model also supports structured outputs for data like scanned invoices, forms, and tables, benefiting sectors such as finance and commerce. Available in base and instruct versions across 3B, 7B, and 72B sizes, Qwen2.5-VL is accessible through platforms like Hugging Face and ModelScope.Starting Price: Free -
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Mistral Large 2
Mistral AI
Mistral AI has launched the Mistral Large 2, an advanced AI model designed to excel in code generation, multilingual capabilities, and complex reasoning tasks. The model features a 128k context window, supporting dozens of languages including English, French, Spanish, and Arabic, as well as over 80 programming languages. Mistral Large 2 is tailored for high-throughput single-node inference, making it ideal for large-context applications. Its improved performance on benchmarks like MMLU and its enhanced code generation and reasoning abilities ensure accuracy and efficiency. The model also incorporates better function calling and retrieval, supporting complex business applications.Starting Price: Free -
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Llama 4 Behemoth
Meta
Llama 4 Behemoth is Meta's most powerful AI model to date, featuring a massive 288 billion active parameters. It excels in multimodal tasks, outperforming previous models like GPT-4.5 and Gemini 2.0 Pro across multiple STEM-focused benchmarks such as MATH-500 and GPQA Diamond. As the teacher model for the Llama 4 series, Behemoth sets the foundation for models like Llama 4 Maverick and Llama 4 Scout. While still in training, Llama 4 Behemoth demonstrates unmatched intelligence, pushing the boundaries of AI in fields like math, multilinguality, and image understanding.Starting Price: Free -
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Llama 4 Maverick
Meta
Llama 4 Maverick is one of the most advanced multimodal AI models from Meta, featuring 17 billion active parameters and 128 experts. It surpasses its competitors like GPT-4o and Gemini 2.0 Flash in a broad range of benchmarks, especially in tasks related to coding, reasoning, and multilingual capabilities. Llama 4 Maverick combines image and text understanding, enabling it to deliver industry-leading results in image-grounding tasks and precise, high-quality output. With its efficient performance at a reduced parameter size, Maverick offers exceptional value, especially in general assistant and chat applications.Starting Price: Free
