The development and rapid evolution of large language model (LLM) capabilities from around mid-2024 to mid-2025 has been astonishing. By almost any benchmark or metric, most of the top tier commercial models and a few open source models have gone from being poor at abstract reasoning, research or math to reaching high-level human performance. If the abilities of the reasoning LLMs on current benchmarks can translate into business, we will see very broad adoption across enterprises large and small. Below is a quick summary of the best of the best (not including Grok 4, which was released 7/10/2025).
Summary:
Gemini 2.5 Pro is Google DeepMind’s top-tier model for complex tasks, powering Google AI Studio and the Gemini app with a massive 1 M-token context window and multimodal inputs. It tops human-preference leaderboards (LMArena) and integrates reasoning across code, math, science, and vision in a single API.
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OpenAI o3 is the company’s most powerful reasoning model, optimized for multi-step analysis across coding, math, science, and visual tasks, and released as part of the ChatGPT Premium suite. The model pushes new state-of-the-art on benchmarks like Codeforces, SWE-bench, and MMMU without bespoke scaffolds.
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ChatGPT 4o (GPT-4o) extends GPT-4 Turbo to a true multimodal interface, handling text, vision, and audio with GPT-4-level reasoning and throughput. The 4o model version delivers fast, interactive performance in the ChatGPT app and API, making advanced reasoning widely accessible.
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In preview, GPT 4.5 is OpenAI’s incremental upgrade over GPT-4o, focusing on improved factual accuracy and conversational fluency for professional use and narrows the gap on complex reasoning- but remains behind specialized logic-tuned variants.
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Claude Opus 4 is Anthropic’s flagship model, designed for sustained, long-form reasoning and agentic code generation across thousands of steps. It arguably leads the world on coding benchmarks, integrates natively with AI agents, and is available via the Anthropic API.
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