We prepared the 2025 version of the HF AI Timeline Grid, highlighting open vs API-based model releases, and allowing you to browse and filter by access, modality, and release type!
1๏ธโฃ Q1 โ Learning to Reason Deepseek not only releases a top-notch reasoning model, but shows how to train them and compete with closed frontier models. OpenAI debuts Deep Research.
Significant milestones: DeepSeek R1 & R1-Zero, Qwen 2.5 VL, OpenAI Deep Research, Gemini 2.5 Pro (experimental)
2๏ธโฃ Q2 โ Multimodality and Coding More LLMs embrace multimodality by default, and there's a surge in coding agents. Strong vision, audio, and generative models emerge.
Significant milestones: Llama 4, Qwen 3, Imagen 4, OpenAI Codex, Google Jules, Claude 4
3๏ธโฃ Q3 โ "Gold" rush, OpenAI opens up, the community goes bananas Flagship models get gold in Math olympiads and hard benchmarks. OpenAI releases strong open source models and Google releases the much anticipated nano-banana for image generation and editing. Agentic workflows become commonplace.
Significant milestones: Gemini and OpenAI IMO Gold, gpt-oss, Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, Grok 4, Claude Sonnet 4.5
4๏ธโฃ Q4 โ Mistral returns, leaderboard hill-climbing Mistral is back with updated model families. All labs release impressive models to wrap up the year!
Significant milestones: Claude Opus 4.5, DeepSeek Math V2, FLUX 2, GPT 5.1, Kimi K2 Thinking, Nano Banana Pro, GLM 4.7, Gemini 3, Mistral 3, MiniMax M2.1 ๐คฏ
For Inference Providers who have built support for our Billing API (currently: Fal, Novita, HF-Inference โ with more coming soon), we've started enabling Pay as you go (=PAYG)
What this means is that you can use those Inference Providers beyond the free included credits, and they're charged to your HF account.
You can see it on this view: any provider that does not have a "Billing disabled" badge, is PAYG-compatible.
Getting WebRTC and Websockets right in python is very tricky. If you've tried to wrap an LLM in a real-time audio layer then you know what I'm talking about.
That's where FastRTC comes in! It makes WebRTC and Websocket streams super easy with minimal code and overhead.
SmolVLM-2 and SigLIP-2 are now part of transformers in dedicated releases!
They're added on top of the v4.49.0 release, and can be installed from the following tags: v4.49.0-SmolVLM-2 and v4.49.0-SigLIP-2.
This marks a new beginning for the release process of transformers. For the past five years, we've been doing monthly releases featuring many models (v4.49.0, the latest release, features 9 new architectures).
Starting with SmolVLM-2 & SigLIP2, we'll now additionally release tags supporting new models on a stable branch. These models are therefore directly available for use by installing from the tag itself. These tags will continue to be updated with fixes applied to these models.
Going forward, continue expecting software releases following semantic versioning: v4.50.0 will have ~10 new architectures compared to v4.49.0, as well as a myriad of new features, improvements and bug fixes. Accompanying these software releases, we'll release tags offering brand new models as fast as possible, to make them accessible to all immediately.