AI tooling in 2025-2026 stabilised significantly versus the 2022-2023 chaos. Some tools won, others retired. This module is the practical inventory — what works, what is overhyped, what to consider for your stack.
Model providers — the 2026 landscape
Closed-source leaders: OpenAI (GPT-4o family + o1 reasoning), Anthropic (Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Claude 4 family), Google (Gemini 1.5/2 Pro). All multi-modal, all with ~200K context, all expensive. Open-weights leaders: Meta Llama-3.x family (8B, 70B, 405B), Mistral (Small, Medium, Large), Alibaba Qwen-2.5 (7B-72B), DeepSeek (V3, R1 for reasoning). Quality 80-95% of closed-source for most tasks. Specialty: BGE-M3 + Jina-v3 for embeddings, Whisper for STT, Stable Diffusion XL/Cascade for images. Indian context: Sarvam, Krutrim, Bharti — improving but trail global open-weights for English. Recommendation: multi-provider via LiteLLM gateway; default to Anthropic for quality + safety, OpenAI for ecosystem, self-hosted Llama for sensitive workloads.
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