Why are there so many AIs you can use now? — Everyone's model race
As the places making it went from a few to dozens, AI went from something you use to something you choose.
1 · Think first
At the end of 2022, you could count the really usable chat AIs on one hand. Now dozens of places — in the US, Europe, China, even South Korea — each put out their own models.
The biggest change was open models. A model's whole bundle of numbers got released, so anyone could download it and run it on their own machine.
So now it's an age of picking which one to use, not just using the one. Price, speed and strengths all differ, and when one place releases a new feature, similar ones pop up all over within a few months.
2 · Experiment · Before & after
Try it — End of 2022 vs. now: what changed?
Pick an item and switch back and forth between 'End of 2022' and 'Now.' The key isn't the numbers — it's how 'being able to choose' changed.
Figure
Size of models anyone could download
Let's see in numbers how fast open models grew.
3 · Quiz
Quick check
Three questions. Pick an answer and it's marked right away, with the reason why.
Today in one line
Today in one line
As the places making it went from a few to dozens,
AI went from something you use to something you choose.
Learn more
- February 2023: the announcement that released a model's numbers to researchers — what made the open-model trend take off — Introducing LLaMA: A foundational, 65-billion-parameter large language model (Meta AI, 2023)
- The 2024 technical report that released a model with 405 billion numbers — and even wrote down how it was made — The Llama 3 Herd of Models (2024)
- A 2025 reasoning-model paper from a Chinese research team — it shows the open-model race isn't just one country's game — DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning (2025)