Best AI tools for research in 2025/2026 year mark.

 

    Authors opinion : 

 The year of 2024 was when AI started drastically improve, and it caused allot of awareness to people in industries such as IT and technologies, which are Data scientists and engineers, as well computer IT specialists, mostly developers. Right now, there are such an online tools available that can write codes for you and share information that are shared only by the experts in universities. There are many tools that people want to use but can't access, because of paid features, but what if I told you that there are only few base AI models existing that actually developed the whole AI program to be able to create these things, and others are just publishers of them who takes the "Advertisement money" for simply making these tools discoverable. There are many tools and ones, for example, like Google Gemini and Microsoft that gives license keys to privatize their AI software by creating your own model through their special programs built for developers. I will share all the base models, and I will request research program to find for me the best models that you can use. And to be honest, some of them are paid, but some of them are still free, but at least you know that you will get the maximum quality out of them.

   Research : 

Welcome. If you've used the internet in the last two years, you've interacted with an artificial intelligence, whether you know it or not. It's the chatbot that helps you with customer service, the "magic" photo editor that removes an unwanted person from your vacation picture, and the hyper-personalized ad that seems to read your mind. But what is really powering these experiences?

You've heard the names—ChatGPT, Google AI, Midjourney—but these are often just the brand names for the services. Underneath the hood is a "core model," a massive, complex engine trained on unfathomable amounts of data. You asked for a guide to these models, from the first effective ones to the current state-of-the-art, and that's exactly what this is. We'll explore who makes them, when they were released, what they can do, and—most importantly—what they cost.

A Quick Primer: How This All Works

Before we dive in, let's clear up a few key concepts.

1. The "Big Bang" (A Brief History): While AI has been a concept for decades, the modern revolution started with a single 2017 research paper from Google: "Attention Is All You Need." This paper introduced the "Transformer" architecture. This new model design was incredibly effective at understanding context and relationships in sequential data (like language). Almost every single model on this list, from GPT-5 to Llama 3, is a direct descendant of this 2017 paper. Early effective models like Google's BERT (2018) and OpenAI's GPT-2 (2019) proved this architecture was the future.

2. Closed vs. Open Models:

   • Closed-Source: These are proprietary, black-box models. You can't see their code or the data they were trained on. The creators (like OpenAI, Google, Anthropic) sell access to them.

   • Open-Weight (or "Open-Source"): These models are published for the world to see. Anyone can download them, run them on their own hardware (if it's powerful enough), and modify them for free. Meta (Llama) and Stability AI (Stable Diffusion) are the champions of this approach.

3. API vs. Subscription (Your "Third-Party" Question): You mentioned that third-party platforms use models like "ChatGPT" to get subscriptions. This is the fundamental business model of AI.

   • Subscription (Consumer): This is what you buy as a user. You pay $20/month for ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro. This gives you direct, user-friendly access to the model through a web interface.

   • API (Developer): This is the "business" side. A new startup, "WriterHelperAI," can pay OpenAI per word to use its GPT-5 model via an Application Programming Interface (API). WriterHelperAI then builds its own website, adds some features, and advertises "Powered by the latest AI" to get you to subscribe to their service for $10/month. The startup is the "third-party platform."

Part 1: The Titans (The Closed-Source Giants)

These companies control the most powerful, and most expensive, models on the market. They are in a direct race for AI supremacy, and their technology powers the majority of AI applications you use today.

1. OpenAI: The Revolution's Leader

OpenAI is the company that brought generative AI to the masses. They are synonymous with the "ChatGPT" brand, but their power comes from the underlying GPT model series. Their strategy is to create the most powerful models and sell access to them.

Core Model Family: GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) Flagship Text Model: GPT-5 Flagship Image Model: DALL-E 3

Model: GPT-5

• Released: August 7, 2025

• Description: GPT-5 is the successor to the models that changed the world (GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and GPT-4o). It is a natively multimodal model, meaning it was trained from the ground up to understand text, images, audio, and code simultaneously. Its signature feature is adaptive reasoning. It can automatically sense the difficulty of your prompt and "decide" whether to give a fast, simple answer (using fewer resources) or engage in a long, complex chain of "thought" to solve a difficult reasoning problem. It has a massive context window of up to 400,000 tokens, allowing it to analyze entire books or codebases at once.

• What You Can Do With It:

  • Text: Ask it to write, edit, summarize, or translate anything. It can draft legal contracts, write poetry, debug complex software, or create entire business plans.

  • Image: Analyze and describe images in intense detail (e.g., "What is the mood of this painting?" or "Find the error in this circuit diagram.").

  • Audio: Powering the new "ChatGPT Voice," it can hold a real-time, natural-sounding conversation with emotional inflection, rather than a robotic "read-back."

  • Reasoning: Solve multi-step logic puzzles, advanced mathematics, and scientific problems.

• How to Access & Price:

  • Consumer Access (ChatGPT):

    • Free: All users get access to GPT-5, but with daily usage limits and potential throttling during peak times.

    • ChatGPT Plus ($20/month): Provides significantly higher usage limits for GPT-5. This is the standard plan for most power users.

    • ChatGPT Pro ($200/month): A new tier for professionals. It guarantees access to the most powerful GPT-5 reasoning modes without limits and offers early access to new features.

  • Developer Access (API):

    • gpt-5: $1.25 per 1 million input tokens and $10.00 per 1 million output tokens.

    • The "Reasoning Tax": A hidden cost. When GPT-5 performs complex reasoning, it uses "thinking tokens" internally, which are billed at the $10/M output rate. A simple query is cheap, but a complex one can cost 5x-10x more than you'd expect.

    • gpt-5-mini: A faster, cheaper variant. $0.25/M input, $2.00/M output.

    • gpt-5-nano: An even smaller, faster model. $0.05/M input, $0.40/M output.

Model: DALL-E 3

• Released: September 2023 (integrated with GPT models)

• Description: OpenAI's flagship text-to-image model. Its key strength is its deep integration with GPT-5. You don't need to "prompt-engineer." You can simply describe what you want in natural language (e.g., "Create a photorealistic image of an astronaut riding a horse on Mars, but make the horse a crystal statue") and GPT-5 will automatically write a detailed, optimized prompt for DALL-E 3 to generate. It is particularly good at creating images that include legible text.

• What You Can Do With It: Generate logos, illustrations, photorealistic scenes, concept art, and website mockups.

• How to Access & Price:

  • Consumer Access: Included with ChatGPT Plus ($20/mo) and Pro ($200/mo).

  • Developer Access (API): $0.04 per image generated.

2. Google AI: The Sleeping Giant Awakens

Google was the company that invented the "T" in GPT (the Transformer). For years, their best models were kept internal. Now, they are in an all-out war with OpenAI, and their Gemini family of models is their weapon. They are uniquely positioned to integrate AI into every product they own, from Search to Android.

Core Model Families: Gemini (Text/Multimodal), Imagen (Image), Veo (Video)

Model: Gemini 2.5 Pro

• Released: ~Mid-2025

• Description: Gemini is Google's flagship "multimodal-from-the-start" model. Like GPT-5, it was designed to ingest text, code, images, and audio seamlessly. Its defining feature is its colossal context window, which can handle up to 2 million tokens (the equivalent of 2,000 pages of text or over 2 hours of video). This makes it the undisputed king of long-document analysis.

• What You Can Do With It:

  • Long-Document Q&A: "Upload" your entire company's knowledge base, multiple large books, or a full movie, and ask detailed questions about it.

  • Cross-Modal Tasks: Give it a video and an audio file and ask it to "find the exact moment in this video where the speaker's tone in the audio file sounds most excited."

  • Coding & Reasoning: All the standard high-end LLM tasks: debugging, writing, and analysis.

• How to Access & Price:

  • Consumer Access (Google AI Plans):

    • Free: Integrated into Google Search and other products with limitations.

    • Google AI Pro ($19.99/month): Unlocks Gemini 2.5 Pro in a chat interface (like ChatGPT), integrates it into Gmail/Docs, and gives limited access to the Veo video model.

    • Google AI Ultra ($249.99/month): For "creators and professionals." Unlocks Gemini 2.5 Deep Think (its highest reasoning mode) and gives 25,000 credits for Veo 3.1.

  • Developer Access (API):

    • Gemini 2.5 Pro: $1.25/M input tokens, $7.50/M output tokens (for context > 200k).

    • Gemini 2.5 Flash: A speed-optimized version. $0.30/M input, $2.50/M output.

Models: Imagen 3 (Image) & Veo 3.1 (Video)

• Released: Imagen 3 (~late 2024), Veo 3.1 (October 15, 2025)

• Description:

  • Imagen 3: Google's high-fidelity text-to-image model. It's known for producing photorealistic images with fewer artifacts and better prompt-following than its competitors.

  • Veo 3.1: This is Google's SOTA text-to-video model, a direct competitor to OpenAI's (still unreleased) Sora. It can generate high-definition video clips with native, synchronized audio. Its newest features include "Scene extension" (making a video longer), "Ingredients to video" (using reference images for style/character), and "First and last frame" (generating the video that connects a start and end image).

• What You Can Do With It:

  • Imagen 3: Create marketing-ready product shots, realistic concept art, and complex scenes.

  • Veo 3.1: Create short films, cinematic b-roll, animated storyboards, and special effects, all from a text prompt.

• How to Access & Price:

  • Consumer Access: Imagen 3 and Veo 3.1 Fast are available via the Google AI Pro ($19.99/mo) plan. The full Veo 3.1 Standard is reserved for the Ultra ($249.99/mo) plan.

  • Developer Access (API):

    • Imagen 3: $0.04 per image

    • Imagen 3 Fast: $0.02 per image

    • Veo 3.1 Standard: $0.40 per second of video generated

    • Veo 3.1 Fast: $0.15 per second of video generated

3. Anthropic: The Safety-First Challenger

Founded by former OpenAI researchers with a focus on AI safety, Anthropic is the "third giant." Their Claude models are renowned for their reliability, "common sense," and more "human-feeling" (and less "corporate") writing style. They are a favorite for developers working on coding and creative writing.

Core Model Family: Claude

Models: Claude 3 Opus, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Claude Haiku 4.5

• Released: Claude 3 (March 2024), 3.5 Sonnet (June 2024), Haiku 4.5 (October 15, 2025)

• Description: Anthropic's "good, better, best" strategy is the clearest in the industry.

  • Claude 3 Opus / 4.1 Opus: The flagship, high-intelligence model. It's a direct competitor to GPT-5 and Gemini 2.5 Pro for the most complex reasoning, math, and science tasks. It's extremely powerful but very expensive.

  • Claude 3.5 Sonnet: The breakthrough workhorse. This model, released in mid-2024, was smarter and faster than the original Opus flagship, at a fraction of the cost. It is widely considered the best balance of intelligence and speed on the market.

  • Claude Haiku 4.5: The brand new, lightning-fast model. It's designed for near-instantaneous responses, making it perfect for customer service chatbots, content moderation, and simple queries. It's incredibly cheap.

• What You Can Do With It:

  • Opus: Tackle Ph.D.-level problems, perform deep financial analysis, conduct scientific research.

  • Sonnet 3.5: The all-rounder. Excellent for writing code, drafting articles, summarizing meetings, and powering 90% of business applications.

  • Haiku 4.5: Powering real-time customer service chats, instantly translating text, or analyzing customer sentiment from thousands of reviews per minute.

• How to Access & Price:

  • Consumer Access (Claude.ai):

    • Free: A free tier with daily limits, often using the Sonnet model.

    • Claude Pro ($20/month): Gives 5x-10x more usage and priority access to the best models, including Opus.

    • Claude Max ($100/month): For heavy-duty professional use, offering 20x+ the usage of the Pro plan.

  • Developer Access (API):

    • Claude 3 Opus: $15.00/M input tokens, $75.00/M output tokens (The premium, expensive option).

    • Claude 3.5 Sonnet: $3.00/M input tokens, $15.00/M output tokens (The popular, balanced option).

    • Claude Haiku 4.5: $1.00/M input tokens, $5.00/M output tokens (The new, high-speed option).

4. Microsoft AI: The Kingmaker and the Coder

Microsoft has a brilliant two-pronged AI strategy. They are OpenAI's most important partner (they've invested billions), but they also develop their own, very different, in-house models.

Strategy 1: Azure OpenAI Service

• Description: Microsoft is a reseller. They take all of OpenAI's models (GPT-5, DALL-E 3, etc.) and host them on their own Azure cloud. This is a huge deal for large corporations. Businesses that already trust Microsoft with their data can use OpenAI's SOTA models inside Azure's secure, enterprise-grade environment.

• What You Can Do With It: Anything you can do with OpenAI's API, but with Microsoft's compliance, security, and data privacy guarantees.

• How to Access & Price:

  • Developer Access (Azure API): The pricing almost perfectly matches OpenAI's direct API pricing.

    • gpt-5 on Azure: $1.25/M input tokens, $10.00/M output tokens.

Strategy 2: Phi Family (In-House Models)

• Released: Phi-3 (April 2024), Phi-4 (late 2024)

• Description: While the giants build $1 billion models, Microsoft's own research team builds "Small Language Models" (SLMs). The Phi family of models is tiny. The Phi-3-mini model, for example, is small enough to run directly on a smartphone, with no internet connection. They are not as "smart" as GPT-5, but they are incredibly capable for their size, performing better than models 10x as large.

• What You Can Do With It:

  • Power on-device applications (e.g., a "smart" keyboard on your phone that doesn't send your data to the cloud).

  • Handle simple, high-volume tasks (like sorting emails or routing customer queries) for an absurdly low price.

  • Run AI in "air-gapped" systems that cannot connect to the internet for security reasons.

• How to Access & Price:

  • Developer Access (Azure API): The "pay-as-you-go" pricing is astonishingly cheap.

    • Phi-3-mini (128k context): $0.13/M input tokens, $0.52/M output tokens.

    • Phi-4-mini: $0.075/M input tokens, $0.30/M output tokens.

  • (Note: That's $0.000075 per 1,000 input tokens. It is hundreds of times cheaper than GPT-5).

5. Midjourney: The AI Artist's Studio

Midjourney is the anomaly. They are a small, self-funded, and highly secretive research lab that has no API. They are not trying to power other apps. They are building a single, proprietary, closed-source product for one thing: creating beautiful, artistic images.

Core Model: Midjourney (Proprietary, versions like v1 (2022) up to v7 or v8 by 2025)

• Released: First version in 2022, models are continuously updated.

• Description: Midjourney is famous for its "opinionated" and highly stylized output. While DALL-E 3 is literal and photorealistic, Midjourney excels at creating "art." It's a favorite among concept artists, designers, and hobbyists. It's accessed primarily through the Discord chat app, where users type /imagine followed by a prompt. They also have a web app and recently launched their own video generation features.

• What You Can Do With It:

  • Create breathtaking concept art for movies or video games.

  • Design logos, T-shirts, and posters with a distinct artistic flair.

  • Generate storyboards and artistic video clips.

• How to Access & Price: Subscription Only. No API. No permanent free tier.

• Basic Plan ($10/month): Provides ~3.3 hours of "Fast GPU" time per month. No "Relax Mode."

• Standard Plan ($30/month): 15 hours of Fast GPU time plus unlimited "Relax Mode" generations (your jobs go into a slower queue). This is the most popular plan.

• Pro Plan ($60/month): 30 hours of Fast GPU time, unlimited Relax Mode, "Stealth Mode" (to keep your images private), and access to video generation.

• Mega Plan ($120/month): 60 hours of Fast GPU time, plus all Pro features.

Remember also about Firefly and Playground models. 

Part 2: The Champions of Openness (The Open-Weight Models)

These organizations are building models and then giving them away for free. Their "price" is $0, but the catch is that you need the (very expensive) hardware and technical expertise to run them yourself. This approach fosters a massive community of developers who fine-tune, modify, and improve upon them.

6. Meta AI: The Open-Source Powerhouse

Meta (Facebook) has fully embraced the open-weight strategy. Their Llama models are the gold standard that all other open models are measured against.

Core Model Family: Llama Flagship Model: Llama 3.1 (405B)

• Released: Llama 3 (April 2024), Llama 3.1 (July 2024)

• Description: The Llama 3.1 family comes in several sizes, from a small 8B (8 billion parameters) model to a massive 405B (405 billion parameters) model. The Llama 3.1 405B is a SOTA model that competes directly with GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet in performance. Because it's "openly available," any company can download it and run it on their own servers, giving them total control over their data and a $0 model cost.

• What You Can Do With It:

  • Anything GPT-5 or Claude can do, but with 100% data privacy.

  • Create a custom, fine-tuned version of the model that is an expert in your specific field (e.g., medicine, law, or your company's internal data).

  • Run a powerful chatbot for free (minus hardware costs).

• How to Access & Price:

  • Price: $0 (Free).

  • Access:

    1. Self-Host: Download the model weights directly from Meta and run them on your own servers (which requires very powerful, expensive GPUs).

    2. Managed Services: Cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud will host the Llama model for you, and you pay them for the server time.

7. Stability AI: The People's Image Generator

Stability AI is to images what Meta is to text. They released the original Stable Diffusion in 2022, which single-handedly democratized AI image generation, as it was the first powerful model that could be run on a high-end consumer graphics card.

Core Model Family: Stable Diffusion Flagship Model: Stable Diffusion 3.5 (SD 3.5)

• Released: October 2024

• Description: SD 3.5 is the latest and most powerful "open-weight" (available under a "Stability AI Community License") image model. It is a massive improvement over its predecessors, with much better prompt-following, photorealism, and the ability to (finally) render legible text.

• What You Can Do With It:

  • Generate any image imaginable, just like DALL-E 3 or Midjourney.

  • Fine-tune the model on your own face, art style, or products to create custom image generators.

  • Use community-built tools for "in-painting" (editing a part of an image) and "out-painting" (extending an image).

• How to Access & Price:

  • Price (Download): $0 (Free). You can download it and run it on your own PC.

  • Developer Access (API): For those who don't want to manage the hardware, Stability sells API access. They charge using "credits" (1 credit = $0.01).

    • SD 3.5 Large: 6.5 credits (~$0.065 per image)

    • SD 3.5 Large Turbo: 4 credits (~$0.04 per image)

    • SD 3.5 Medium: 3.5 credits (~$0.035 per image)

    • SD 3.5 Flash: 2.5 credits (~$0.025 per image)

Conclusion: The New AI Economy

As you can see, the "AI" market isn't one single thing. It's a vast, layered ecosystem.

• At the top, OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic are in a fierce battle of "closed" SOTA models, funded by subscriptions and expensive API calls.

• Microsoft plays both sides, reselling OpenAI's models to businesses while building its own family of tiny, hyper-efficient Phi models.

• Midjourney has carved out a massively profitable creative niche by being a closed, subscription-only product for artists.

• And finally, Meta and Stability AI are the open-weight champions, giving away their powerful models for free to fuel a Cambrian explosion of new startups, tools, and research, all built on their "free" foundation.

The "third-party platforms" you see are just the top layer of this stack. They are businesses that pay API fees to OpenAI, Google, or Anthropic—or run a "free" Llama model on a cloud server—and then package that power into a user-friendly product for you to subscribe to. This is the new economy, and these are the engines that make it run.

A Final, Critical Clarification: Why "OpenAI" and "ChatGPT" Isn't a Core Model.

You'll notice one of the most famous names in the world, "ChatGPT," is missing from this list of core models. That's intentional, and it's one of the most common points of confusion. Think of it this way: OpenAI is the company (the car manufacturer, like Ford). The core model is the engine (the GPT-5 engine). ChatGPT is the car itself (the Ford Mustang). It's the specific product you buy and "drive," an application built around the core engine. When you use the ChatGPT Plus subscription, you are paying for a user-friendly dashboard (the chat app) that gives you access to OpenAI's best engines, like GPT-5 and DALL-E 3. This is why so many "third-party platforms" can exist—OpenAI sells its GPT-5 engine to other companies, who then build their own "cars" (like a writing assistant or a legal tool) and sell them to you. It is simply a marketing strategy to promote already existing core models for the extra revenue to the ChatGPT and OpenAI platforms. 

   Conclusion : 

To be able to build and run core models, You need high amounts of information and professionals working for the company. Most of AI's that promises good results aren't core models; they are just well used and adjusted used core models, and just re-modelled to fit the design and match up requests with buttons on publishers websites.