Looking for the best open‑source AI model you can run yourself? This 2025 roundup compares model size, speed, cost, and hardware needs, so you can pick the right one.
It's fair to say the self-hosted AI landscape is exploding. Proprietary giants still dominate benchmarks, but open-source models like DeepSeek R1, Mistral Small 3.1, and JetMoE are delivering impressive performance, often at a fraction of the cost. Here’s an honest breakdown of what’s out there, and which model might work best for your next project.
What “self-hosted” really means
Self-hosted AI models are locally deployable—you download the weights, run inference on your own hardware, and control everything from latency to data privacy. That contrasts with calling a remote API where you pay per-token, depend on network uptime, and deal with cloud fees.
Top contenders in 2025
DeepSeek R1
- Open weights, MIT license
- Outperforms OpenAI’s GPT‑4o on benchmarks like MATH and AIME
- Designed to be efficient—trained with far fewer resources than competitors
- Great for complex reasoning and math
Mistral Small 3.1 (24B)
- Heavy-duty open-source release
- Parses images and handles long context windows (up to 128K tokens)
- Ideal for multimodal and document-rich tasks
JetMoE‑8B
- Mixture-of-experts model that beats LLaMA‑2 7B while using only a fraction of compute
- Efficient inference—activates only part of full model per token
DBRX (Databricks/Mosaic)
- 132B MoE model rivaling open-source counterparts
DeepSeek R1
- Inference speed: Modest
- Hardware needs: Moderate GPU or high-end CPU
- Context window: ~128K tokens (estimate)
- Best use case: Math-heavy, logic-intensive workloads
- License: MIT
Mistral Small 3.1
- Inference speed: Fast on GPU or modern CPU
- Hardware needs: Accessible (single GPU or powerful CPU)
- Context window: 128K tokens
- Best use case: Multimodal tasks, long documents
- License: Apache‑2.0
JetMoE‑8B
- Inference speed: Very efficient due to MoE (Mixture-of-Experts)
- Hardware needs: Minimal (good for single GPU or CPU-only setups)
- Context window: Standard (~4K–8K tokens depending on version)
- Best use case: Resource-constrained environments
- License: Open research
DBRX (Databricks)
- Inference speed: Efficient for size, but requires solid hardware
- Hardware needs: High (often >2 GPUs recommended)
- Context window: Standard
- Best use case: General-purpose applications at scale
- License: Databricks Open
DeepSeek’s R1 leads on reasoning, Mistral is ideal for long docs or images, JetMoE is great if you’re tight on GPU, and DBRX nails general tasks but needs strong hardware.
- Meta’s Yann LeCun said DeepSeek R1 shows open-source is catching up
- Reddit users on r/LocalLLM prefer DeepSeek, Qwen, Janus 7B for workloads
How to choose your model
- Define your use case – Math, code, chat, images? Focus on benchmarks for that domain.
- Check hardware – CPU-only? Go for Mistral Small or JetMoE. Got GPUs? DeepSeek or DBRX are great.
- Evaluate latency requirements – If you need fast inference per token, smaller or MoE models help.
- Consider context window – Bigger is better for long conversations or documents.
- License & ecosystem – Apache/MIT are easy for commercial use; MoE/open-research may need review.
Video recommendation
Title: Top AI Models 2025 Compared / What Engineers Need to Know
Channel: Engineered Intelligence
Final thoughts
In 2025, the most efficient self-hosted AI models are no longer academic curiosities, they’re truly powerful tools. DeepSeek R1 is a logic/reasoning powerhouse, Mistral handles long and multimodal contexts, while JetMoE and DBRX offer efficient but capable alternatives.
Choose the one that fits your hardware, use case, and performance needs, and you might never need to pay per-token or compromise privacy again.
