3 emerging trends in the LLM space (2025 Edition)

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It has been almost 20 months since ChatGPT emerged and the world got introduced to LLMs. 

Since then they have grown leaps and bounds.

Initially, these models could only process text, but now they have multi-modal capabilities, which means they can also process voice, image and video.

Then came the flood of “open-sourced” LLMs. There are 3000+ open-sourced LLMs out there as I write this. We can use some of these models for free even for commercial purposes. 

Then LLMs got reasoning abilities, they started interacting with external software (like Google, Python REPL, Weather app, etc.) and started self-reflecting. 

This gave birth to AI Agents.

Now, what’s next? 

Where is LLM research heading? What are AI researchers doing in the LLM field?

There are 3 key emerging trends in the LLM space

1 Domain-specific LLMs 

Currently, LLMs are generic. They possess lots of knowledge about various fields. So, the next logical step is to make LLMs which are experts or “super specialized” in a particular field like finance, biology, coding, etc.

Domain specific LLMs could further increase the accuracy and reduce hallucination.

2 Non-Transformer LLMs

Currently, most LLMs are “transformer” based. We all know GPT in chatGPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer. 

But the question is, can we deviate from standard transformer architecture and solve the pain points of transformers to further improve accuracy?

So this is also an active area of research nowadays.

3 Smaller (yet more efficient LLMs)

LLMs require a lot of computational power and hence more money. To make them more efficient, we could increase the parameters but that would further increase the cost. 

To give you an idea it costs somewhere around $ 5-10 million to train models like LLama2 and GPT3. 

Further increasing the cost is just not sustainable and beyond the reach of many small companies and researchers. 

And thats the reason, we need smaller LLMs with reduced parameters which are equally (or more) effective.

Which of these trends you are excited about?

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My Name is Nikhilesh and if you have any feedback/suggestions on this article, please feel free to connect with me – https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikhileshtayal/