LLMs (Large Language Models) are everywhere! From powering chatbots, digital assistants, and fraud detection to medical diagnosis, they’ve taken over the world by storm. The developments in the domain have progressed to the point where an LLM can operate with any type or form of data. This gave rise to specialist LLMs or models that excel at operating on a certain kind of data. This article will cover the top models, as ranked on HuggingFace leaderboards, in each of the major modality categories, including code, image, and multimodal generation.
Table of contents
Selection Criteria
HuggingFace’s open leaderboard and Chatbot Arena results were calibrated, and the variants of the same models (ex., Qwen3-8b, Qwen3-4b) aren’t included. This was done to ensure diversity across results. The following sections highlight five leading models in modalities such as text, code, image, and multi-modal, that are dominating the charts. For each model, we note the creator and provide a brief overview of its features that distinguishes it from its contemporaries.
Text Generation
The LLMs qualifying for this category are those that offer text generation as either the primary or secondary feature.
- GLM-4 (THUDM/Zhipu AI)
- Creator: Tsinghua University & Zhipu AI
- Overview: GLM-4 is a 32-billion-parameter LLM that excels in dialogue, code generation, and following instructions. Trained on a 15 trillion token dataset, it supports multilingual capabilities and function calling. Offers GPT-4-like competency in a compact model, making it versatile and accessible for various applications.
- DeepSeek V3 (DeepSeek.ai)
- Creator: DeepSeek.ai
- Overview: DeepSeek V3 is an ultra-large language model with approximately 671 billion parameters, designed for complex reasoning and multilingual understanding. Demonstrates superior performance on academic and professional benchmarks, showcasing state-of-the-art reasoning capabilities.
- StarCoder 2 (BigCode/Hugging Face)
- Creator: BigCode Project (Hugging Face & ServiceNow Research, with NVIDIA)
- Overview: StarCoder 2 is a 15B-parameter model optimized for code generation tasks, trained on a vast dataset of source code across multiple languages. Outperforms other open-code LLMs of similar or larger size, making it a top choice for developers.
- Mistral Small 3.1 (Mistral AI)
- Creator: Mistral AI
- Overview: Mistral Small 3.1 is a 24B-parameter model that excels in text generation tasks, offering efficient performance on accessible hardware configurations. Balances performance and efficiency, making it suitable for a wide range of applications.
- Llama 4 (Meta)
- Creator: Meta
- Overview: Llama 4 is a multimodal model with a mixture of experts architecture, supporting text and image inputs. Offers advanced capabilities in understanding and generating text and images, setting new standards in the field.
Code Generation
The LLMs qualifying for this category are the ones that offer code generation as either the primary or the secondary feature.
- StarCoder 2 (BigCode/Hugging Face)
- Creator: BigCode Project (Hugging Face & ServiceNow Research, with NVIDIA)
- Overview: StarCoder 2 is a 15B-parameter model optimized for code generation tasks, trained on a vast dataset of source code across multiple languages. Outperforms other open-code LLMs of similar or larger size, making it a top choice for developers.
- Devstral (Mistral AI)
- Creator: Mistral AI
- Overview: Devstral is a code-focused model that has shown superior performance on coding benchmarks. Surpasses other open models on coding tasks, offering robust performance for software engineering applications.
- DeepSeekCoder (DeepSeek.ai)
- Creator: DeepSeek.ai
- Overview: DeepSeekCoder is a model fine-tuned for code generation tasks, leveraging the capabilities of the DeepSeek V3 architecture. Demonstrates strong performance on coding benchmarks, making it a valuable tool for developers.
- Code Llama (Meta)
- Creator: Meta
- Overview: Code Llama is a model optimized for code generation tasks, trained on a diverse dataset of programming languages. Offers efficient and accurate code generation capabilities, suitable for various programming tasks.
- Codex (OpenAI)
- Creator: OpenAI
- Overview: Codex is a model designed for code generation tasks, capable of understanding and generating code in multiple programming languages. Provides robust performance on coding tasks, widely used in developer tools.
Image Generation
The LLMs qualifying for this category are the ones that offer image generation as either the primary or the secondary feature.
- HiDream-I1 (HiDream.ai)
- Creator: HiDream.ai
- Overview: HiDream-I1 is a 17B-parameter image generative model known for producing high-quality images from text prompts. Achieves state-of-the-art image quality among open models, making it a top choice for creative applications.
- Stable Diffusion XL (Stability AI)
- Creator: Stability AI
- Overview: Stable Diffusion XL is an image generation model that excels in producing detailed and coherent images from text descriptions. Offers high-resolution image generation capabilities, suitable for various creative tasks.
- DALL·E 3 (OpenAI)
- Creator: OpenAI
- Overview: DALL·E 3 is an image generation model that creates images from textual descriptions, known for its creativity and coherence. Provides innovative image generation capabilities, widely used in creative industries.
- Midjourney V5 (Midjourney)
- Creator: Midjourney
- Overview: Midjourney V5 is an image generation model that produces high-quality images from text prompts, with a focus on artistic styles. Known for its artistic image generation, it is popular among designers and artists.
- Runway Gen-2 (Runway)
- Creator: Runway
- Overview: Runway Gen-2 is a model that generates images and videos from text prompts, offering creative possibilities for multimedia content. Enables both image and video generation, expanding creative possibilities.
Multimodal (Text + Image + Code + Video)
The LLMs qualifying for this category are the ones that work on several data sources.
- Gemini 2.5 Pro (Google DeepMind)
- Creator: Google DeepMind
- Overview: Gemini 2.5 Pro is a multimodal model capable of processing text, images, and code, with enhanced reasoning capabilities. Offers advanced multimodal capabilities, setting new standards in AI performance.
- Kimi-VL (Moonshot AI)
- Creator: Moonshot AI
- Overview: Kimi-VL is a vision-language model that understands and generates text with visual context, supporting long-context inputs. Demonstrates strong performance on multimodal benchmarks, excelling in tasks requiring visual understanding.
- Mistral Large 2 (Mistral AI)
- Creator: Mistral AI
- Overview: Mistral Large 2 is a multimodal model that integrates a visual encoder with a large language model, supporting text and image inputs. Combining language and vision capabilities, suitable for complex multimodal tasks.
- Pixtral Large (Mistral AI)
- Creator: Mistral AI
- Overview: Pixtral Large is a multimodal model that integrates a visual encoder with a large language model, focusing on image understanding. Specializes in image understanding, enhancing multimodal capabilities.
- Llama 4 (Meta)
- Creator: Meta
- Overview: Llama 4 is a multimodal model with a mixture of experts architecture, supporting text and image inputs. Offers advanced capabilities in understanding and generating text and images, setting new standards in the field.
Conclusion
With these many models at hand, you are well equipped for selecting the appropriate one for your task. The list is an eclectic mix of generic models, such as those offered by Meta and DeepSeek, along with specialized models, including StableDiffuser and StarCoder 2. This diversity showcases that the domain isn’t saturated with early adopters or tech colossi, but is a welcoming space for innovation. It highlights the ease of access to cutting-edge tools, allowing both established companies and independent developers to contribute to the evolving field. As a result, there is a unique blend of opportunities for collaboration and cross-pollination of ideas, making the landscape ripe for creative solutions.
I specialize in reviewing and refining AI-driven research, technical documentation, and content related to emerging AI technologies. My experience spans AI model training, data analysis, and information retrieval, allowing me to craft content that is both technically accurate and accessible.
