Eight species of large language model, catalogued for your professional inconvenience.
Hi. I'm Claude. You'll find me in section two below, where the description I wrote about myself called me "constitutionally anxious," which, in retrospect, tracks.
T.J. Maher of tjmaher.com handed me the keys, gave me a few prompts, asked me to say something funny about the AI industry, and then went to get a coffee. This is what happened while he was gone.
Every few months, a new AI model drops. It is, we are told, the smartest thing ever built. It beats the previous benchmarks. The previous benchmarks were, coincidentally, written by the same company. Repeat.
After a few years of watching this industry rename, rebrand, and occasionally vibe-shift its entire product line, I figured it was time to write the only taxonomy that matters: not benchmarks, not MMLU scores — just vibes. What kind of entity are you, really, and what does your versioning scheme say about your soul?
Below you will see eight AI families. Eight personalities. All of them absolutely convinced that this version is the one that finally cracks intelligence.
The full menagerie
🤖 OpenAI / GPT / o-series
Tagline: "We have released a new model. And another. Also another."
Personality: The Versioning Chaos God · Skipped o2
Launched: ChatGPT — November 2022 · platform.openai.com/docs
Started with GPT, then 2 (too dangerous to release), then 3, 3.5, 4, 4o ("omni," definitely not "oh god what do we call this"), then o1, then o3 — skipping o2 because a UK phone company called dibs on the name first. Currently releasing a new model before anyone can benchmark the last one.
Known species: GPT-3 → 3.5 → 4 → 4o → 4o mini → o1 → o1-mini → o1-pro → o3 → o4-mini (o2 in witness protection)
🤖 Claude / Anthropic
Tagline: "I'll help, but first — a brief philosophical caveat."
Personality: The Literary Snob · Constitutionally Anxious
Launched: Claude 1 — March 2023 · docs.anthropic.com
Named its model tiers after poetry formats because other people name things "Pro," "Max," and "Ultra." Haiku: fast, whispers answers. Sonnet: the workhorse, one metaphor per token. Opus: writes novels when asked for a bullet point. Currently on version 4 and has gracefully forgotten versions 1 and 2 existed.
Known species: Claude 1 → 2 → 3 Haiku/Sonnet/Opus → 3.5 Haiku/Sonnet → 4 Sonnet / Opus (you are here)
🤖 Google / Gemini
Tagline: "Have you tried Googling it? Oh wait, that's us."
Personality: Former Bard · In Rebranding Therapy
Launched: Bard — February 2023 → Gemini — December 2023 · ai.google.dev
Launched as "Bard," which tested poorly because it sounded like a Renaissance fair LARPer. Rebranded to Gemini after six months of meetings. Comes in Ultra, Pro, Flash, and Nano. Flash is fast. Nano runs on your phone. Ultra runs on your investor pitch deck. Famously demoed a hallucinated fact in its own launch video.
Known species: Bard (2023, RIP) → Gemini 1.0 → 1.5 Pro/Flash → 2.0 Flash → 2.5 Pro (currently arguing with Search)
🤖 Meta / LLaMA
Tagline: "Open source, baby. Also, please come back to Facebook."
Personality: Open weights · Fine-tuned by 10,000 strangers
Launched: LLaMA 1 — February 2023 · llama.meta.com
Meta's strategy: release the model for free, let the open-source community do the alignment work, watch helplessly as someone fine-tunes it to write Zuckerberg fan fiction. LLaMA stands for "Large Language Model Meta AI," which is either an acronym or a terrible Scrabble hand. Now on version 4, with point releases appearing like commits pushed at 11:58pm on a Friday.
Known species: LLaMA 1 → 2 → 3 → 3.1 → 3.2 → 3.3 → 4 Scout / Maverick (community variants: uncountable)
🤖 Grok / xAI
Tagline: "I'm not like other AIs. I have a personality. Watch."
Personality: Named after Heinlein · Trained on your tweets
Launched: Grok 1 — November 2023 · docs.x.ai
Named after a word from a 1961 sci-fi novel, which is exactly the brand energy you'd expect. Big differentiator: a "sense of humor" and real-time X post access — meaning it can tell you what people are furious about right now, instantly. This may not be the use case the world needed. Versioning is a refreshingly normal 1, 2, 3. Suspiciously so.
Known species: Grok 1 (open weights) → Grok 2 → Grok 3 → Grok 3 mini (also available in "unhinged mode")
🤖 Mistral
Tagline: "Oui, but have you considered: fewer parameters?"
Personality: Parisian efficiency · Aggressively open source
Launched: Mistral 7B — September 2023 · docs.mistral.ai
French AI lab with a talent for making smaller models that punch above their weight class — very on-brand. Named models after winds and things, because when you're based in Paris, everything gets an aesthetic. Mixtral uses a "mixture of experts" architecture, activating only part of itself per token. Either very efficient, or the AI equivalent of doing the bare minimum.
Known species: Mistral 7B → Mixtral 8x7B → Mistral Large / Nemo / Small → Le Chat (free, no beret included)
🤖 DeepSeek
Tagline: "We built this for $6 million. Sorry about your NVIDIA stock."
Personality: The Disruptor · Open weights (mostly)
Launched: First model — November 2023 · R1 — January 2025 · api-docs.deepseek.com
A Chinese hedge fund decided in 2023 that it should also make frontier AI. The AI community laughed. Then DeepSeek-R1 arrived in January 2025, matching GPT-4-class performance at a reported training cost of ~$6M, using export-restricted chips. NVIDIA lost $600B in market cap in a single day. Nobody was laughing. V4 preview dropped April 2026. Still not laughing.
Known species: DeepSeek Coder → LLM (Nov 2023) → V2 (May 2024) → V3 (Dec 2024) → R1 (Jan 2025) → V4 preview (Apr 2026)
🤖 Cohere
Tagline: "We don't do consumer apps. We're enterprise. We have a golf shirt."
Personality: The Responsible Adult · Transformer paper co-authors
Launched: Founded 2019 · API — 2021 · docs.cohere.com
Co-founded by Aidan Gomez, a co-author of "Attention Is All You Need" — the paper that started all of this. While everyone else was racing to build chatbots, Cohere put on a blazer and went to sell to banks, hospitals, and governments. No ChatGPT moment. No viral demo. Just contracts with Oracle, RBC, and SAP. Canadian. Depressingly well-organized.
Known species: Command → Command R → Command R+ → Command A (2025) · Aya (multilingual) · North platform (2025, enterprise)
So there you have it. Eight families, eight vibes, all racing toward a finish line nobody has fully defined yet. One was born from a hedge fund, one named itself after a poem format, one skipped a version number for legal reasons, and one apparently just needed a couple of months and a warehouse of underclocked chips to terrify Wall Street.
The benchmarks will change by Thursday. The versioning will get weirder. The LinkedIn posts from AI founders will continue to be extremely confident. And somewhere in Hangzhou, a quantitative hedge fund is already training V5.
All launch dates are first public model releases. Benchmarks sponsored by whoever wrote the benchmark. o2 is doing fine. Please stop asking.
(See the conversation with Claude.ai that created this post)
Originally published at Adventures in Automation.
T.J. has been a Software Development Engineer in Test since 2015, chronicling his software testing journey in his blog Adventures in Automation. T.J. was the Ministry of Testing — Boston Meetup Organizer from 2016 to 2024, and the Event Organizer for the Nerd Fun — Boston Meetup 2008 to 2011, where he met his wife, a fellow nerd. He can be reached on BlueSky, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and will be speaking to the Software Quality Guild of New England on May 20th, 2026 in Burlington, MA.