Best Large Language Models for Azure Model Catalog

Mistral AI stands out as an innovative startup in the realm of artificial intelligence, focusing on open-source generative solutions. The company provides a diverse array of customizable, enterprise-level AI offerings that can be implemented on various platforms, such as on-premises, cloud, edge, and devices. Among its key products are "Le Chat," a multilingual AI assistant aimed at boosting productivity in both personal and professional settings, and "La Plateforme," a platform for developers that facilitates the creation and deployment of AI-driven applications. With a strong commitment to transparency and cutting-edge innovation, Mistral AI has established itself as a prominent independent AI laboratory, actively contributing to the advancement of open-source AI and influencing policy discussions. Their dedication to fostering an open AI ecosystem underscores their role as a thought leader in the industry.

Cohere is a robust enterprise AI platform that empowers developers and organizations to create advanced applications leveraging language technologies. With a focus on large language models (LLMs), Cohere offers innovative solutions for tasks such as text generation, summarization, and semantic search capabilities. The platform features the Command family designed for superior performance in language tasks, alongside Aya Expanse, which supports multilingual functionalities across 23 different languages. Emphasizing security and adaptability, Cohere facilitates deployment options that span major cloud providers, private cloud infrastructures, or on-premises configurations to cater to a wide array of enterprise requirements. The company partners with influential industry players like Oracle and Salesforce, striving to weave generative AI into business applications, thus enhancing automation processes and customer interactions. Furthermore, Cohere For AI, its dedicated research lab, is committed to pushing the boundaries of machine learning via open-source initiatives and fostering a collaborative global research ecosystem. This commitment to innovation not only strengthens their technology but also contributes to the broader AI landscape.

Grok-3, created by xAI, signifies a major leap forward in artificial intelligence technology, with aspirations to establish new standards in AI performance. This model is engineered as a multimodal AI, enabling it to interpret and analyze information from diverse channels such as text, images, and audio, thereby facilitating a more holistic interaction experience for users. Grok-3 is constructed on an unprecedented scale, utilizing tenfold the computational resources of its predecessor, harnessing the power of 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs within the Colossus supercomputer. Such remarkable computational capabilities are expected to significantly boost Grok-3's effectiveness across various domains, including reasoning, coding, and the real-time analysis of ongoing events by directly referencing X posts. With these advancements, Grok-3 is poised to not only surpass its previous iterations but also rival other prominent AI systems in the generative AI ecosystem, potentially reshaping user expectations and capabilities in the field. The implications of Grok-3's performance could redefine how AI is integrated into everyday applications, paving the way for more sophisticated technological solutions.

GPT-4.1 represents a significant upgrade in generative AI, with notable advancements in coding, instruction adherence, and handling long contexts. This model supports up to 1 million tokens of context, allowing it to tackle complex, multi-step tasks across various domains. GPT-4.1 outperforms earlier models in key benchmarks, particularly in coding accuracy, and is designed to streamline workflows for developers and businesses by improving task completion speed and reliability.

DeepSeek-R1 is a cutting-edge open-source reasoning model created by DeepSeek, aimed at competing with OpenAI's Model o1. It is readily available through web, app, and API interfaces, showcasing its proficiency in challenging tasks such as mathematics and coding, and achieving impressive results on assessments like the American Invitational Mathematics Examination (AIME) and MATH. Utilizing a mixture of experts (MoE) architecture, this model boasts a remarkable total of 671 billion parameters, with 37 billion parameters activated for each token, which allows for both efficient and precise reasoning abilities. As a part of DeepSeek's dedication to the progression of artificial general intelligence (AGI), the model underscores the importance of open-source innovation in this field. Furthermore, its advanced capabilities may significantly impact how we approach complex problem-solving in various domains.

xAI’s Grok 4 represents a major step forward in AI technology, delivering advanced reasoning, multimodal understanding, and improved natural language capabilities. Built on the powerful Colossus supercomputer, Grok 4 can process text and images, with video input support expected soon, enhancing its ability to interpret cultural and contextual content such as memes. It has outperformed many competitors in benchmark tests for scientific and visual reasoning, establishing itself as a top-tier model. Focused on technical users, researchers, and developers, Grok 4 is tailored to meet the demands of advanced AI applications. xAI has strengthened moderation systems to prevent inappropriate outputs and promote ethical AI use. This release signals xAI’s commitment to innovation and responsible AI deployment. Grok 4 sets a new standard in AI performance and versatility. It is poised to support cutting-edge research and complex problem-solving across various fields.

Introducing Mistral NeMo, our latest and most advanced small model yet, featuring a cutting-edge 12 billion parameters and an expansive context length of 128,000 tokens, all released under the Apache 2.0 license. Developed in partnership with NVIDIA, Mistral NeMo excels in reasoning, world knowledge, and coding proficiency within its category. Its architecture adheres to industry standards, making it user-friendly and a seamless alternative for systems currently utilizing Mistral 7B. To facilitate widespread adoption among researchers and businesses, we have made available both pre-trained base and instruction-tuned checkpoints under the same Apache license. Notably, Mistral NeMo incorporates quantization awareness, allowing for FP8 inference without compromising performance. The model is also tailored for diverse global applications, adept in function calling and boasting a substantial context window. When compared to Mistral 7B, Mistral NeMo significantly outperforms in understanding and executing detailed instructions, showcasing enhanced reasoning skills and the ability to manage complex multi-turn conversations. Moreover, its design positions it as a strong contender for multi-lingual tasks, ensuring versatility across various use cases.

Utilize sophisticated coding and language models across a diverse range of applications. Harness the power of expansive generative AI models that possess an intricate grasp of both language and code, paving the way for enhanced reasoning and comprehension skills essential for developing innovative applications. These advanced models can be applied to multiple scenarios, including writing support, automatic code creation, and data reasoning. Moreover, ensure responsible AI practices by implementing measures to detect and mitigate potential misuse, all while benefiting from enterprise-level security features offered by Azure. With access to generative models pretrained on vast datasets comprising trillions of words, you can explore new possibilities in language processing, code analysis, reasoning, inferencing, and comprehension. Further personalize these generative models by using labeled datasets tailored to your unique needs through an easy-to-use REST API. Additionally, you can optimize your model's performance by fine-tuning hyperparameters for improved output accuracy. The few-shot learning functionality allows you to provide sample inputs to the API, resulting in more pertinent and context-aware outcomes. This flexibility enhances your ability to meet specific application demands effectively.

GPT-4.1 mini is a streamlined version of GPT-4.1, offering the same core capabilities in coding, instruction adherence, and long-context comprehension, but with faster performance and lower costs. Ideal for developers seeking to integrate AI into real-time applications, GPT-4.1 mini maintains a 1 million token context window and is well-suited for tasks that demand low-latency responses. It is a cost-effective option for businesses that need powerful AI capabilities without the high overhead associated with larger models.

GPT-4.1 nano is a lightweight and fast version of GPT-4.1, designed for applications that prioritize speed and affordability. This model can handle up to 1 million tokens of context, making it suitable for tasks such as text classification, autocompletion, and real-time decision-making. With reduced latency and operational costs, GPT-4.1 nano is the ideal choice for businesses seeking powerful AI capabilities on a budget, without sacrificing essential performance features.

Mistral Medium 3 is an innovative AI model designed to offer high performance at a significantly lower cost, making it an attractive solution for enterprises. It integrates seamlessly with both on-premises and cloud environments, supporting hybrid deployments for more flexibility. This model stands out in professional use cases such as coding, STEM tasks, and multimodal understanding, where it achieves near-competitive results against larger, more expensive models. Additionally, Mistral Medium 3 allows businesses to deploy custom post-training and integrate it into existing systems, making it adaptable to various industry needs. With its impressive performance in coding tasks and real-world human evaluations, Mistral Medium 3 is a cost-effective solution that enables companies to implement AI into their workflows. Its enterprise-focused features, including continuous pretraining and domain-specific fine-tuning, make it a reliable tool for sectors like healthcare, financial services, and energy.

OpenAI’s GPT-5 mini is a cost-efficient, faster version of the flagship GPT-5 model, designed to handle well-defined tasks and precise inputs with high reasoning capabilities. Supporting text and image inputs, GPT-5 mini can process and generate large amounts of content thanks to its extensive 400,000-token context window and a maximum output of 128,000 tokens. This model is optimized for speed, making it ideal for developers and businesses needing quick turnaround times on natural language processing tasks while maintaining accuracy. The pricing model offers significant savings, charging $0.25 per million input tokens and $2 per million output tokens, compared to the higher costs of the full GPT-5. It supports many advanced API features such as streaming responses, function calling, and fine-tuning, while excluding audio input and image generation capabilities. GPT-5 mini is compatible with a broad range of API endpoints including chat completions, real-time responses, and embeddings, making it highly flexible. Rate limits vary by usage tier, supporting from hundreds to tens of thousands of requests per minute, ensuring reliability for different scale needs. This model strikes a balance between performance and cost, suitable for applications requiring fast, high-quality AI interaction without extensive resource use.

DeepSeek V3.1 stands as a revolutionary open-weight large language model, boasting an impressive 685-billion parameters and an expansive 128,000-token context window, which allows it to analyze extensive documents akin to 400-page books in a single invocation. This model offers integrated functionalities for chatting, reasoning, and code creation, all within a cohesive hybrid architecture that harmonizes these diverse capabilities. Furthermore, V3.1 accommodates multiple tensor formats, granting developers the versatility to enhance performance across various hardware setups. Preliminary benchmark evaluations reveal strong results, including a remarkable 71.6% on the Aider coding benchmark, positioning it competitively with or even superior to systems such as Claude Opus 4, while achieving this at a significantly reduced cost. Released under an open-source license on Hugging Face with little publicity, DeepSeek V3.1 is set to revolutionize access to advanced AI technologies, potentially disrupting the landscape dominated by conventional proprietary models. Its innovative features and cost-effectiveness may attract a wide range of developers eager to leverage cutting-edge AI in their projects.

Introducing the next iteration of our open-source large language model, this version features model weights along with initial code for the pretrained and fine-tuned Llama language models, which span from 7 billion to 70 billion parameters. The Llama 2 pretrained models have been developed using an impressive 2 trillion tokens and offer double the context length compared to their predecessor, Llama 1. Furthermore, the fine-tuned models have been enhanced through the analysis of over 1 million human annotations. Llama 2 demonstrates superior performance against various other open-source language models across multiple external benchmarks, excelling in areas such as reasoning, coding capabilities, proficiency, and knowledge assessments. For its training, Llama 2 utilized publicly accessible online data sources, while the fine-tuned variant, Llama-2-chat, incorporates publicly available instruction datasets along with the aforementioned extensive human annotations. Our initiative enjoys strong support from a diverse array of global stakeholders who are enthusiastic about our open approach to AI, including companies that have provided valuable early feedback and are eager to collaborate using Llama 2. The excitement surrounding Llama 2 signifies a pivotal shift in how AI can be developed and utilized collectively.

OpenAI’s GPT-5 represents the cutting edge in AI language models, designed to be smarter, faster, and more reliable across diverse applications such as legal analysis, scientific research, and financial modeling. This flagship model incorporates built-in “thinking” to deliver accurate, professional, and nuanced responses that help users solve complex problems. With a massive context window and high token output limits, GPT-5 supports extensive conversations and intricate coding tasks with minimal prompting. It introduces advanced features like the verbosity parameter, enabling users to control the detail and tone of generated content. GPT-5 also integrates seamlessly with enterprise data sources like Google Drive and SharePoint, enhancing response relevance with company-specific knowledge while ensuring data privacy. The model’s improved personality and steerability make it adaptable for a wide range of business needs. Available in ChatGPT and API platforms, GPT-5 brings expert intelligence to every user, from casual individuals to large organizations. Its release marks a major step forward in AI-assisted productivity and collaboration.

The Grok-3 Mini, developed by xAI, serves as a nimble and perceptive AI assistant specifically designed for individuals seeking prompt yet comprehensive responses to their inquiries. Retaining the core attributes of the Grok series, this compact variant offers a lighthearted yet insightful viewpoint on various human experiences while prioritizing efficiency. It caters to those who are constantly on the go or have limited access to resources, ensuring that the same level of inquisitiveness and support is delivered in a smaller package. Additionally, Grok-3 Mini excels at addressing a wide array of questions, offering concise insights without sacrificing depth or accuracy, which makes it an excellent resource for navigating the demands of contemporary life. Ultimately, it embodies a blend of practicality and intelligence that meets the needs of modern users.

The latest iteration in the GPT-5 series, known as GPT-5.1, aims to significantly enhance the intelligence and conversational abilities of ChatGPT. This update features two separate model types: GPT-5.1 Instant, recognized as the most popular option, is characterized by a warmer demeanor, improved instruction adherence, and heightened intelligence; on the other hand, GPT-5.1 Thinking has been fine-tuned as an advanced reasoning engine, making it easier to grasp, quicker for simpler tasks, and more diligent when tackling complex issues. Additionally, queries from users are now intelligently directed to the model variant that is best equipped for the specific task at hand. This update not only focuses on boosting raw cognitive capabilities but also on refining the communication style, resulting in models that are more enjoyable to interact with and better aligned with users' intentions. Notably, the system card addendum indicates that GPT-5.1 Instant employs a feature called "adaptive reasoning," allowing it to determine when deeper thought is necessary before formulating a response, while GPT-5.1 Thinking adjusts its reasoning time precisely in relation to the complexity of the question posed. Ultimately, these advancements mark a significant step forward in making AI interactions more intuitive and user-friendly.

Phi-4 is an advanced small language model (SLM) comprising 14 billion parameters, showcasing exceptional capabilities in intricate reasoning tasks, particularly in mathematics, alongside typical language processing functions. As the newest addition to the Phi family of small language models, Phi-4 illustrates the potential advancements we can achieve while exploring the limits of SLM technology. It is currently accessible on Azure AI Foundry under a Microsoft Research License Agreement (MSRLA) and is set to be released on Hugging Face in the near future. Due to significant improvements in processes such as the employment of high-quality synthetic datasets and the careful curation of organic data, Phi-4 surpasses both comparable and larger models in mathematical reasoning tasks. This model not only emphasizes the ongoing evolution of language models but also highlights the delicate balance between model size and output quality. As we continue to innovate, Phi-4 stands as a testament to our commitment to pushing the boundaries of what's achievable within the realm of small language models.

OpenAI’s GPT-5 Pro represents the pinnacle of AI reasoning power, offering enhanced capabilities for solving the toughest problems with unparalleled precision and depth. This version leverages extensive parallel compute resources to deliver highly accurate, detailed answers that outperform prior models across challenging scientific, medical, mathematical, and programming benchmarks. GPT-5 Pro is particularly effective in handling multi-step, complex queries that require sustained focus and logical reasoning. Experts consistently rate its outputs as more comprehensive, relevant, and error-resistant than those from standard GPT-5. It seamlessly integrates with existing ChatGPT offerings, allowing Pro users to access this powerful reasoning mode for demanding tasks. The model’s ability to dynamically allocate “thinking” resources ensures efficient and expert-level responses. Additionally, GPT-5 Pro features improved safety, reduced hallucinations, and better transparency about its capabilities and limitations. It empowers professionals and researchers to push the boundaries of what AI can achieve.

GPT-5.1 Instant is an advanced AI model tailored for everyday users, merging rapid response times with enhanced conversational warmth. Its adaptive reasoning capability allows it to determine the necessary computational effort for tasks, ensuring swift responses while maintaining a deep level of understanding. By focusing on improved instruction adherence, users can provide detailed guidance and anticipate reliable execution. Additionally, the model features expanded personality controls, allowing the chat tone to be adjusted to Default, Friendly, Professional, Candid, Quirky, or Efficient, alongside ongoing trials of more nuanced voice modulation. The primary aim is to create interactions that feel more organic and less mechanical, all while ensuring robust intelligence in writing, coding, analysis, and reasoning tasks. Furthermore, GPT-5.1 Instant intelligently manages user requests through the main interface, deciding whether to employ this version or the more complex “Thinking” model based on the context of the query. Ultimately, this innovative approach enhances user experience by making interactions more engaging and tailored to individual preferences.

GPT-5.1 Thinking represents an evolved reasoning model within the GPT-5.1 lineup, engineered to optimize "thinking time" allocation according to the complexity of prompts, allowing for quicker responses to straightforward inquiries while dedicating more resources to tackle challenging issues. In comparison to its earlier version, it demonstrates approximately double the speed on simpler tasks and takes twice as long for more complex ones. The model emphasizes clarity in its responses, minimizing the use of jargon and undefined terminology, which enhances the accessibility and comprehensibility of intricate analytical tasks. It adeptly modifies its reasoning depth, ensuring a more effective equilibrium between rapidity and thoroughness, especially when addressing technical subjects or multi-step inquiries. By fusing substantial reasoning power with enhanced clarity, GPT-5.1 Thinking emerges as an invaluable asset for handling complicated assignments, including in-depth analysis, programming, research, or technical discussions, while simultaneously decreasing unnecessary delays for routine requests. This improved efficiency not only benefits users seeking quick answers but also supports those engaged in more demanding cognitive tasks.

Developed by xAI, Grok 4 Fast is a next-generation AI model designed to handle queries with unmatched speed and efficiency. It represents a leap forward in responsiveness, cutting latency while providing highly accurate and relevant answers across a wide spectrum of topics. With advanced natural language understanding, it smoothly transitions between casual dialogue, technical inquiries, and in-depth problem-solving scenarios. Its integration of real-time data analysis makes it particularly valuable for users who require timely, updated information in fast-changing contexts. Grok 4 Fast is widely available, supporting Grok, X, and dedicated mobile apps for both iOS and Android devices. The model’s streamlined architecture enhances both speed and reliability, making it suitable for personal use, business applications, and research. Subscription tiers allow users to access expanded usage quotas and unlock more intensive workloads. With these advancements, Grok 4 Fast underscores xAI’s vision of accelerating human discovery and enabling deeper engagement through intelligent technology.