AI is evolving faster than ever—and open-source AI models are catching up to proprietary models at an incredible pace. In this episode of the Data Neighbor Podcast, we sit down with Maarten Grootendorst, co-author of Hands-On Large Language Models with Jay Alammar, DeepLearning.AI instructor, and creator of BERTopic and KeyBERT, to break down the real differences between open-source and closed-source AI models.We’ll discuss how LLMs (Large Language Models) evolved from bag-of-words and Word2Vec to modern transformer-based models like BERT, GPT-4, DeepSeek, LLaMA 2, and Mixtral. More importantly, we explore when open-source AI models might actually be better than proprietary models from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic.

• Hands-On Large Language Models (Maarten’s Book): https://www.amazon.com/Hands-Large-Language-Models-Understanding/dp/1098150961
• DeepLearning.AI Course: How Transformer LLMs Work: https://www.deeplearning.ai/short-courses/how-transformer-llms-work/
• Maarten’s AI Newsletter: https://newsletter.maartengrootendorst.com/

Connect with us!

• Maarten Grootendorst: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mgrootendorst/
• Hai Guan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hai-guan-6b58a7a/
• Sravya Madipalli: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sravyamadipalli/
• Shane Butler: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shaneausleybutler/