What Are Open-Source LLMs?

Open-source LLMs are large language models whose weights are publicly available for download, modification, and local deployment — no API keys or cloud services required.

Why Use Open-Source Models?

• Free: No per-token API costs
• Private: Data never leaves your machine
• Offline: Works without internet
• Customizable: Fine-tune on your own data
• No rate limits: Run as many queries as your hardware allows

Top Open-Source Models (2025)

Model	Parameters	Developer	Best For
Llama 3	8B, 70B	Meta	General-purpose
Mistral	7B	Mistral AI	Fast, efficient
Gemma 2	9B, 27B	Google	Lightweight tasks
Phi-3	3.8B, 14B	Microsoft	Small & capable
Qwen 2	7B, 72B	Alibaba	Multilingual
DeepSeek V2	236B (MoE)	DeepSeek	Coding, math

Running Open-Source Models

The easiest way to run open-source models on Mac is with Ollama:

ollama run llama3        # General chat
ollama run codellama     # Code generation
ollama run mistral       # Fast responses

Models are automatically quantized to fit in memory.

Open-Source Models in Elvean

Elvean connects to Ollama natively — all your downloaded models appear automatically. Mix local open-source models with cloud APIs in the same workspace, switching between them with @mentions.