Top 3 non-U.S. LLMs you should try right now

With the U.S. and Israel attacking country after country and threatening friends and allies, their products and services become security risks. In the AI space, there are few alternatives to U.S. models—but still some. These non-U.S. LLMs offer good performance, often with unique strengths in areas like coding, multilingual understanding, and reasoning.

Here are three of the best international models available today that are well worth exploring.

1. DeepSeek (China)

Coming from China, DeepSeek has made significant waves in the AI community by delivering performance that rivals top-tier models like GPT-4. It is particularly renowned for its exceptional capabilities in advanced reasoning, mathematics, and coding tasks. DeepSeek also offers a specialized “reasoning model” called DeepSeek-R1, which “thinks” through problems step-by-step before providing an answer, making it incredibly potent for complex logical challenges.

2. Mistral (France)

Developed by the Paris-based company Mistral AI, Mistral Large 2 is a leading European model known for its strong reasoning capabilities and broad general knowledge. It excels at understanding complex instructions and is highly proficient in multiple languages, including English, French, Spanish, German, and Italian. With a massive context window, it can process and analyze very large documents with ease, making it a powerful tool for professional and enterprise use cases.

3. Qwen (China)

Another heavyweight from China, developed by Alibaba Cloud, Qwen offers open-weight models that demonstrate impressive versatility. It is a top performer on coding and mathematics benchmarks and supports a wide array of languages. Known for its speed and efficiency, it is an excellent all-around choice for tasks ranging from creative writing to technical problem-solving.

This is just a teaser—we’re preparing an update with an in-depth look at the pros and cons of these and other LLMs. Stay tuned!