Top LLMs of 2024: Only the Worthy
Tags: ai, llm, gpt3, nlp
Published: 2024-05-16 07:00:00

## Introduction

In a world where change is the only constant, [large language models](https://zilliz.com/learn/large-language-models-and-search) (LLMs) represent the highest level of evolution in [natural language processing](https://zilliz.com/learn/A-Beginner-Guide-to-Natural-Language-Processing). These highly sophisticated artificial intelligence programs have changed our relationship with technology and what can be done with language, comprehension, and production.

As we enter 2024, many claims about game-changing models among LLMs exist. But worry not! We’re here to give you an entertaining, truthful, and nonsense-free rundown on what will happen this year. Without delay, let's introduce the top LLMs of 2024. 


## OpenAI’s GPT-4

OpenAI's Generative Pre-trained Transformer ([GPT](https://zilliz.com/learn/ChatGPT-Vector-Database-Prompt-as-code)) models have ignited the first wave of excitement in AI development. Among these models, GPT-4 stands out as a significant advancement following the success of GPT 3.5. This GPT series iteration introduces many enhancements, including heightened reasoning capabilities, advanced image processing, and an expanded context window capable of handling over 25,000 words of text.

Beyond its technical prowess, GPT-4 significantly advances emotional intelligence, enabling it to engage in empathetic interactions with users. This attribute is invaluable in use cases like customer service interactions, outperforming traditional search engines or content generators. Moreover, GPT-4 can generate much more inclusive and unbiased content, addressing pertinent concerns regarding fairness and impartiality. It also incorporates robust security measures to safeguard against data misuse or mishandling, fostering user trust and maintaining confidentiality.

OpenAI also provides multimodal models like [GPT-4o](https://openai.com/index/hello-gpt-4o/), which can reason across audio, vision, and text. 


## Gemini: The Dark Horse in NLP

Google's [Gemini](https://blog.google/technology/ai/google-gemini-ai/) is a language model distinguished by its unique Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture. It addresses key challenges in many language model applications, particularly concerning energy efficiency and the necessity for fine-tuning. It encompasses three versions—Gemini Ultra, Gemini Pro, and Gemini Nano—tailored to diverse scales and objectives, each offering varying levels of intricacy and adaptability to effectively meet specific requirements.

The MoE architecture of Gemini selectively activates related components based on input, fostering accelerated convergence and heightened performance without imposing a substantial computational overhead. Furthermore, Gemini introduces parameter sparsity by updating designated weights per training step, alleviating computational burdens, shortening training durations, and reducing energy consumption—a significant stride toward fostering eco-friendly and cost-effective training processes for large-scale AI models. 

The latest iteration, [Gemini 1.5](https://zilliz.com/blog/will-retrieval-augmented-generation-RAG-be-killed-by-long-context-LLMs), builds upon the foundation of its predecessors, presenting optimized functionalities such as an expanded context window spanning up to 10 million tokens and reduced training compute demands thanks to its MoE architecture. Among its achievements is its proficiency in managing long-context multimodal tasks and its ability to demonstrate improved accuracy in benchmark assessments like 1H-VideoQA and EgoSchema. 


## Cohere for Coherence: NLP’s New Favorite

[Cohere](https://cohere.com/) is another innovative language model that brings fresh perspectives to understanding and generating human-like text. It offers a myriad of applications for solving real-world challenges, such as content generation and sentiment analysis.

One of [Cohere's](https://zilliz.com/product/integrations/cohere) standout features is its ability to swiftly produce articles, blogs, or social media posts based on keywords, prompts, or structured data provided to it. This functionality proves especially beneficial for time-strapped marketers seeking engaging content promptly, as Cohere adeptly crafts titles, headlines, and descriptions, significantly streamlining manual efforts.

Moreover, Cohere excels in sentiment analysis, harnessing the power of natural language processing (NLP) to discern the emotional tone—positive, negative, or neutral—embedded within a given text. This capability empowers businesses to gauge customer sentiments regarding their products or services through reviews and feedback. Additionally, it enables organizations to grasp public sentiments on politics or sports, aiding in campaign planning by ensuring alignment with prevailing preferences.


## Falcon: Speed Meets Accuracy

Developed by Training Infrastructure Intelligence (TII), [Falcon](https://huggingface.co/blog/falcon) has earned acclaim for its speed and accuracy across various applications. It offers two primary models: Falcon-40B and Falcon-7B, both of which have demonstrated impressive performance on the [Open LLM Leaderboard](https://huggingface.co/spaces/HuggingFaceH4/open_llm_leaderboard). 

The [Falcon](https://zilliz.com/learn/Falcon-180B-advancing-language-models-in-AI-frontier) models feature a tailored transformer architecture, focusing solely on decoding while integrating innovative components such as Flash Attention, RoPE embeddings (Position Encodings learned with Random Permutation), Multi-Query Attention Heads, Parallel Attention layers, and Feed-Forward Layers. These enhancements significantly enhance inference speed, surpassing GPT-3 by up to five times during testing phases where single examples are processed sequentially.

Despite requiring 75% less computing power than GPT-3 during pre-training, Falcon 40 still demands approximately 90GB of GPU memory. However, the requirement was reduced to about 15 Gigabytes for fine-tuning or running inference on consumer-grade laptops. Notably, Falcon excels in tasks like classification or summarization, prioritizing speed without compromising quality, making it a top choice in scenarios where swift completion is paramount.


## Mixtral: The Jack of All Trades

[Mixtral](https://mistral.ai/news/mixtral-of-experts/) is a language model developed by Mistral AI that has gained significant popularity due to its wide range of NLP applications. Its design and functionality make it a good fit for enterprises and developers who need an all-inclusive solution to language problems. [Mixtral](https://zilliz.com/blog/building-rag-without-openai-mixtral-milvus-octoai) can handle language-based tasks concurrently, like writing essays, generating summaries, translating languages, or even coding, underscoring its applicability in various contexts. The most impressive thing about this model is its ability to adapt to different languages and situations, enhancing global communication and enabling service provision for diverse populations.

From a technical perspective, Mixtral operates on a Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (SMoE) architecture, optimizing efficiency by selectively activating related components within the model for each task. This targeted approach reduces computational costs while simultaneously boosting processing speed. For example, Mixtral 8x7B boasts a substantial context window size of 32k tokens. This feature enables it to manage lengthy conversations adeptly and tackle complex documents that demand a nuanced understanding of context, facilitating detailed content creation and advanced retrieval augmented generation with precision and effectiveness.

Despite having many parameters, Mixtral offers cost-effective inference similar to smaller models, making it a favorite for businesses that require advanced NLP capabilities without incurring high computational costs. The ability to support multiple languages, including French, German, Spanish, Italian, and English, makes Mixtral an invaluable asset for international companies seeking global communication channels and content generation abilities. 


## Llama: The People’s LLM

Llama, a series of open-source language models developed by Meta, has been recognized as "The People’s LLM" for its commitment to accessibility and user-friendliness. This unique focus makes Llama models the preferred choice for those prioritizing data security and seeking to develop customized LLMs independently of generic third-party options. Among its iterations, Llama2 and Llama3 stand out prominently. 

[Llama2](https://huggingface.co/blog/llama2) features a suite of pre-trained and fine-tuned LLMs, with training parameters ranging from 7B to 70B. Compared to its predecessor, Llama1, Llama2 has undergone training on 40% more tokens and boasts a significantly extended context window. Moreover, Llama2 offers intuitive interfaces and tools, minimizing entry barriers for non-experts and seamlessly integrating with the Hugging Face Model Hub for effortless access to pre-trained language models and datasets.

A significant advancement over Llama2, [Llama3](https://ai.meta.com/blog/meta-llama-3/) is a major leap forward. Pretrained and fine-tuned on datasets with parameters ranging from 8B to 70B, [Llama3](https://zilliz.com/learn/how-to-build-rag-system-using-llama3-ollama-dspy-milvus) exhibits enhanced performance in contextual understanding, reasoning, code generation, and various complex multi-step tasks. Furthermore, it refines its post-training processes, leading to a notable reduction in false refusal rates, improved response alignment, and increased diversity in model answers. Llama3 will soon be available to AWS, GCP, Azure, and many other public clouds. 


## Side-by-Side Comparison

|                                       |                                                  |                                                                                            |                                                           |                                                                                         |                                                                                     |                                                                                       |                                                                                                       |
| ------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------ | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | --------------------------------------------------------- | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| Feature/Model                         | Mistral Large                                    | GPT-3.5 Turbo Instruct                                                                     | GPT-4                                                     | Gemini                                                                                  | Llama 2                                                                             | Cohere(Command)                                                                       | Falcon                                                                                                |
| **Creator**                           | Mistral                                          | OpenAI                                                                                     | OpenAI                                                    | Google                                                                                  | Meta                                                                                | Cohere                                                                                | Talesfromtheloop                                                                                      |
| **Price per 1M Tokens**               | $12.00                                           | $1.63                                                                                      | $37.50                                                    | $10.50                                                                                  | $1.00(for llama 70B But varies for other models)                                    | $1.44                                                                                 | $1.44                                                                                                 |
| **Input Token Price**                 | $8.00                                            | $1.50                                                                                      | $30.00                                                    | $7.00                                                                                   | $0.90(for llama 70B But varies for other models)                                    | $1.25                                                                                 | $1.25                                                                                                 |
| **Output Token Price**                | $24.00                                           | $2.00                                                                                      | $60.00                                                    | $21.00                                                                                  | $1.00(for llama 70B But varies for other models)                                    | $2.00                                                                                 | $2.00                                                                                                 |
| **Throughput (tokens/sec)**           | 30.3                                             | 116.4                                                                                      | 19.7                                                      | 43.8                                                                                    | 42.2(for llama 70B But varies for other models)                                     | 28.4                                                                                  | 500                                                                                                   |
| **Latency (TTFT in seconds)**         | 0.37                                             | 0.55                                                                                       | 0.53                                                      | 1.23                                                                                    | 0.38(for llama 70B But varies for other models)                                     | 0.35                                                                                  | 0.35                                                                                                  |
| **Context Window**                    | 33k tokens                                       | 4.1k tokens                                                                                | 8.2k tokens                                               | 1.0M tokens                                                                             | 4.1k tokens (for llama 70B But varies for other models)                             | 4.1k tokens                                                                           | 4096 tokens                                                                                           |
| **Parameter Size**                    | 6B                                               | 175B                                                                                       | 350B                                                      | 40B (Base) & 7B (Lite)                                                                  | 70B(variable)                                                                       | Variable                                                                              | Variable, Optimized for Tasks                                                                         |
| **Speed (Tokens per Second)**         | High                                             | High, \~100 tokens/sec                                                                     | Very High, \~200 tokens/sec                               | 5x Faster than GPT-3, \~500 tokens/sec                                                  | High, \~100 tokens/sec                                                              | Up to 5x Faster than GPT-3, \~500 tokens/sec                                          | Up to 5x Faster than GPT-3, \~500 tokens/sec                                                          |
| **Accuracy**                          | High, \~97% on benchmark tests                   | High, \~97% on benchmark tests                                                             | Very High, \~98% on benchmark tests                       | Higher than GPT-3, \~98% on benchmark tests                                             | High, \~97% on benchmark tests                                                      | Comparable to GPT-3, \~97% on benchmark tests                                         | Higher than GPT-3, \~98% on benchmark tests                                                           |
| **Energy Efficiency**                 | High                                             | Moderate, \~0.5 Joules per token                                                           | Improved, \~0.3 Joules per token                          | Very High, \~0.1 Joules per token                                                       | High, \~0.2 Joules per token                                                        | Very High, \~0.1 Joules per token                                                     | Very High, \~0.1 Joules per token                                                                     |
| **Multilingual Support**              | Yes                                              | Yes                                                                                        | Yes                                                       | Yes                                                                                     | Yes                                                                                 | Yes                                                                                   | Yes                                                                                                   |
| **Integration with Existing Systems** | Offers APIs and SDKs                             | Integrate GPT-3.5 into Flask-based chat support with Hugging Face Transformers             | Offers compatibility with TensorFlow and PyTorch          | Enables easy integration with AWS Lambda and Google Cloud Functions                     | Offers SDKs for web and mobile apps                                                 | Cohere offers APIs compatible with Python, JavaScript, and Java                       | Falcon's RESTful APIs enable seamless integration into existing systems                               |
| **Real-World Applications**           | Used in conversational AI and content generation | Used in a wide range of applications, from content creation tools to customer service bots | Works with TensorFlow and PyTorch. Active in academia.    | Used in gaming for dynamic dialogue and in marketing for personalized emails            | In smart home devices for voice commands and in automotive for infotainment systems | Applied in healthcare for document translation and in finance for automated reporting | Utilized in logistics for real-time route optimization and in retail for predicting consumer behavior |
| **Accessibility**                     | Offers cloud APIs and on-prem deployment         | Demands substantial computational resources                                                | Provides cloud-based solutions for broader accessibility. | Designed for scalable cloud deployment, adaptable to various project sizes and budgets. | Emphasizes SDKs for easy cross-platform integration.                                | Offers cloud-accessible APIs for cost-effective experimentation.                      | Balances power and accessibility with flexible cloud deployment                                       |


## Conclusion: Choosing Your Champion

The models we've highlighted today stand out as the crème de la crème of 2024. From OpenAI's GPT-4 and its versatility to Cohere's laser-sharp focus on coherence, each of these LLMs offers something unique and game-changing.

But the real question is, which one is right for you? As you navigate the LLM landscape, it's crucial to consider your specific needs and use cases. Do you require lightning-fast performance for time-sensitive applications? Cohere's coherence might be your best bet. Or are you looking for an efficient, resource-light model for your mobile app? Gemini could be the perfect fit.

Ultimately, the choice is yours. But one thing is sure: the possibilities are endless with these top-tier LLMs at your disposal. So, what are you waiting for? It's time to unleash the power of language processing and take your business or project to new heights.


## Further Reading

We hope this guide has given you a comprehensive overview of the top LLMs shaking up the industry in 2024. But we know there's always more to explore in this rapidly evolving landscape.

We encourage you to share your experiences with these models or others you believe deserve recognition. What has been your go-to LLM for your projects or applications? Have you discovered any hidden gems that we may have missed? We're eager to hear your thoughts and insights.

To help you dive deeper into the world of these remarkable LLMs, we've compiled a list of further reading and resources for each model discussed:

GPT-4

- [OpenAI's GPT-4 Announcement](https://openai.com/research/gpt-4)

- [GPT-4 Technical Details and Capabilities](https://www.anthropic.com/gpt-4)

Cohere

- [Cohere's LLM Offerings](https://www.cohere.com/products)

- [Cohere's Approach to Coherence](https://www.cohere.com/blog/coherence-in-language-models)

Gemini

- [Gemini AI's Website](https://www.gemini-ai.com/)

- [Technical Paper on Gemini's Architecture](https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.12083)

Falcon

- [Falcon LLM Documentation](https://www.falcon-llm.com/docs/)

- [Falcon's Performance Benchmarks](https://www.falcon-llm.com/benchmarks/)

Mixtral

- [Mixtral AI's Homepage](https://www.mixtral.ai/)

- [Mixtral's Integration Capabilities](https://www.mixtral.ai/integrations)

We can't wait to see what the future holds for these incredible LLMs and the countless ways they'll continue to transform the world of technology. Keep exploring, keep innovating, and let us know what you discover along the way!