Best Large Language Models in the UK

Large Language Models (LLMs) in Vertex AI enable businesses to perform complex natural language processing tasks such as text generation, summarization, and sentiment analysis. These models, powered by massive datasets and cutting-edge techniques, can understand context and generate human-like responses. Vertex AI offers scalable solutions for training, fine-tuning, and deploying LLMs to meet business needs. New customers receive $300 in free credits, allowing them to explore the potential of LLMs in their applications. With these models, businesses can enhance their AI-driven text-based services and improve customer interactions.

GPT-4o (“o” for “omni”) is a step towards much more natural human-computer interaction—it accepts as input any combination of text, audio, image, and video and generates any combination of text, audio, and image outputs. It can respond to audio inputs in as little as 232 milliseconds, with an average of 320 milliseconds, which is similar to human response time (opens in a new window) in a conversation. It matches GPT-4 Turbo performance on text in English and code, with significant improvement on text in non-English languages, while also being much faster and 50% cheaper in the API. GPT-4o is especially better at vision and audio understanding compared to existing models.

A small model with superior textual intelligence and multimodal reasoning. GPT-4o mini enables a broad range of tasks with its low cost and latency, such as applications that chain or parallelize multiple model calls (e.g., calling multiple APIs), pass a large volume of context to the model (e.g., full code base or conversation history), or interact with customers through fast, real-time text responses (e.g., customer support chatbots). Today, GPT-4o mini supports text and vision in the API, with support for text, image, video and audio inputs and outputs coming in the future. The model has a context window of 128K tokens, supports up to 16K output tokens per request, and has knowledge up to October 2023. Thanks to the improved tokenizer shared with GPT-4o, handling non-English text is now even more cost effective.

GPT-4 with vision (GPT-4V) enables users to instruct GPT-4 to analyze image inputs provided by the user, and is the latest capability we are making broadly available. Incorporating additional modalities (such as image inputs) into large language models (LLMs) is viewed by some as a key frontier in artificial intelligence research and development. Multimodal LLMs offer the possibility of expanding the impact of language-only systems with novel interfaces and capabilities, enabling them to solve new tasks and provide novel experiences for their users. In this system card, we analyze the safety properties of GPT-4V. Our work on safety for GPT-4V builds on the work done for GPT-4 and here we dive deeper into the evaluations, preparation, and mitigation work done specifically for image inputs.

On September 17, 2024, Mistral AI announced several key updates to enhance the accessibility and performance of their AI offerings. They introduced a free tier on "La Plateforme," their serverless platform for tuning and deploying Mistral models as API endpoints, enabling developers to experiment and prototype at no cost. Additionally, Mistral AI reduced prices across their entire model lineup, with significant cuts such as a 50% reduction for Mistral Nemo and an 80% decrease for Mistral Small and Codestral, making advanced AI more cost-effective for users. The company also unveiled Mistral Small v24.09, a 22-billion-parameter model offering a balance between performance and efficiency, suitable for tasks like translation, summarization, and sentiment analysis. Furthermore, they made Pixtral 12B, a vision-capable model with image understanding capabilities, freely available on "Le Chat," allowing users to analyze and caption images without compromising text-based performance.

Qwen2-VL is the latest version of the vision language models based on Qwen2 in the Qwen model familities. Compared with Qwen-VL, Qwen2-VL has the capabilities of: SoTA understanding of images of various resolution & ratio: Qwen2-VL achieves state-of-the-art performance on visual understanding benchmarks, including MathVista, DocVQA, RealWorldQA, MTVQA, etc. Understanding videos of 20 min+: Qwen2-VL can understand videos over 20 minutes for high-quality video-based question answering, dialog, content creation, etc. Agent that can operate your mobiles, robots, etc.: with the abilities of complex reasoning and decision making, Qwen2-VL can be integrated with devices like mobile phones, robots, etc., for automatic operation based on visual environment and text instructions. Multilingual Support: to serve global users, besides English and Chinese, Qwen2-VL now supports the understanding of texts in different languages inside images

Palmyra is a suite of Large Language Models (LLMs) engineered for precise, dependable performance in enterprise applications. These models excel in tasks such as question-answering, image analysis, and support for over 30 languages, with fine-tuning available for industries like healthcare and finance. Notably, Palmyra models have achieved top rankings in benchmarks like Stanford HELM and PubMedQA, and Palmyra-Fin is the first model to pass the CFA Level III exam. Writer ensures data privacy by not using client data to train or modify their models, adopting a zero data retention policy. The Palmyra family includes specialized models such as Palmyra X 004, featuring tool-calling capabilities; Palmyra Med, tailored for healthcare; Palmyra Fin, designed for finance; and Palmyra Vision, which offers advanced image and video processing. These models are available through Writer's full-stack generative AI platform, which integrates graph-based Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG).

LLaVA (Large Language-and-Vision Assistant) is an innovative multimodal model that integrates a vision encoder with the Vicuna language model to facilitate comprehensive visual and language understanding. Through end-to-end training, LLaVA exhibits impressive chat capabilities, emulating the multimodal functionalities of models like GPT-4. Notably, LLaVA-1.5 has achieved state-of-the-art performance across 11 benchmarks, utilizing publicly available data and completing training in approximately one day on a single 8-A100 node, surpassing methods that rely on billion-scale datasets. The development of LLaVA involved the creation of a multimodal instruction-following dataset, generated using language-only GPT-4. This dataset comprises 158,000 unique language-image instruction-following samples, including conversations, detailed descriptions, and complex reasoning tasks. This data has been instrumental in training LLaVA to perform a wide array of visual and language tasks effectively.

Fullmoon is a free, open source application that enables users to interact with large language models directly on their devices, ensuring privacy and offline accessibility. Optimized for Apple silicon, it operates seamlessly across iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and visionOS platforms. Users can personalize the app by adjusting themes, fonts, and system prompts, and it integrates with Apple's Shortcuts for enhanced functionality. Fullmoon supports models like Llama-3.2-1B-Instruct-4bit and Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct-4bit, facilitating efficient on-device AI interactions without the need for an internet connection.

Falcon 2 11B is an open-source, multilingual, and multimodal AI model, uniquely equipped with vision-to-language capabilities. It surpasses Meta’s Llama 3 8B and delivers performance on par with Google’s Gemma 7B, as independently confirmed by the Hugging Face Leaderboard. Looking ahead, the next phase of development will integrate a 'Mixture of Experts' approach to further enhance Falcon 2’s capabilities, pushing the boundaries of AI innovation.

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.

Qwen3.5 is a next-generation open-weight multimodal large language model designed to power native vision-language agents. The flagship release, Qwen3.5-397B-A17B, combines a hybrid linear attention architecture with sparse mixture-of-experts, activating only 17 billion parameters per forward pass out of 397 billion total to maximize efficiency. It delivers strong benchmark performance across reasoning, coding, multilingual understanding, visual reasoning, and agent-based tasks. The model expands language support from 119 to 201 languages and dialects while introducing a 1M-token context window in its hosted version, Qwen3.5-Plus. Built for multimodal tasks, it processes text, images, and video with advanced spatial reasoning and tool integration. Qwen3.5 also incorporates scalable reinforcement learning environments to improve general agent capabilities. Designed for developers and enterprises, it enables efficient, tool-augmented, multimodal AI workflows.

Pixtral Large is a 124-billion-parameter open-weight multimodal model developed by Mistral AI, building upon their Mistral Large 2 architecture. It integrates a 123-billion-parameter multimodal decoder with a 1-billion-parameter vision encoder, enabling advanced understanding of documents, charts, and natural images while maintaining leading text comprehension capabilities. With a context window of 128,000 tokens, Pixtral Large can process at least 30 high-resolution images simultaneously. The model has demonstrated state-of-the-art performance on benchmarks such as MathVista, DocVQA, and VQAv2, surpassing models like GPT-4o and Gemini-1.5 Pro. Pixtral Large is available under the Mistral Research License for research and educational use, and under the Mistral Commercial License for commercial applications.

Claude Haiku 3 is the fastest and most affordable model in its intelligence class. With state-of-the-art vision capabilities and strong performance on industry benchmarks, Haiku is a versatile solution for a wide range of enterprise applications. The model is now available alongside Sonnet and Opus in the Claude API and on claude.ai for our Claude Pro subscribers.

Aya is a new state-of-the-art, open-source, massively multilingual, generative large language research model (LLM) covering 101 different languages — more than double the number of languages covered by existing open-source models. Aya helps researchers unlock the powerful potential of LLMs for dozens of languages and cultures largely ignored by most advanced models on the market today. We are open-sourcing both the Aya model, as well as the largest multilingual instruction fine-tuned dataset to-date with a size of 513 million covering 114 languages. This data collection includes rare annotations from native and fluent speakers all around the world, ensuring that AI technology can effectively serve a broad global audience that have had limited access to-date.