We prepared the 2025 version of the HF AI Timeline Grid, highlighting open vs API-based model releases, and allowing you to browse and filter by access, modality, and release type!
1️⃣ Q1 — Learning to Reason Deepseek not only releases a top-notch reasoning model, but shows how to train them and compete with closed frontier models. OpenAI debuts Deep Research.
Significant milestones: DeepSeek R1 & R1-Zero, Qwen 2.5 VL, OpenAI Deep Research, Gemini 2.5 Pro (experimental)
2️⃣ Q2 — Multimodality and Coding More LLMs embrace multimodality by default, and there's a surge in coding agents. Strong vision, audio, and generative models emerge.
Significant milestones: Llama 4, Qwen 3, Imagen 4, OpenAI Codex, Google Jules, Claude 4
3️⃣ Q3 — "Gold" rush, OpenAI opens up, the community goes bananas Flagship models get gold in Math olympiads and hard benchmarks. OpenAI releases strong open source models and Google releases the much anticipated nano-banana for image generation and editing. Agentic workflows become commonplace.
Significant milestones: Gemini and OpenAI IMO Gold, gpt-oss, Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, Grok 4, Claude Sonnet 4.5
4️⃣ Q4 — Mistral returns, leaderboard hill-climbing Mistral is back with updated model families. All labs release impressive models to wrap up the year!
Significant milestones: Claude Opus 4.5, DeepSeek Math V2, FLUX 2, GPT 5.1, Kimi K2 Thinking, Nano Banana Pro, GLM 4.7, Gemini 3, Mistral 3, MiniMax M2.1 🤯
Why I think local, open-source models will eventually win.
The most useful AI applications are moving toward multi-turn agentic behavior: systems that take hundreds or even thousands of iterative steps to complete a task, e.g. Claude Code, computer-control agents that click, type, and test repeatedly.
In these cases, the power of the model is not how smart it is per token, but in how quickly it can interact with its environment and tools across many steps. In that regime, model quality becomes secondary to latency.
An open-source model that can call tools quickly, check that the right thing was clicked, or verify that a code change actually passes tests can easily outperform a slightly “smarter” closed model that has to make remote API calls for every move.
Eventually, the balance tips: it becomes impractical for an agent to rely on remote inference for every micro-action. Just as no one would tolerate a keyboard that required a network request per keystroke, users won’t accept agent workflows bottlenecked by latency. All devices will ship with local, open-source models that are “good enough” and the expectation will shift toward everything running locally. It’ll happen sooner than most people think.