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Model Families

Gemma, Llama, Qwen and friends — lineage and when to use which

01 ·Model Families·FREE·PAPER·10 min read The Gemma Family from Scratch — Lineage, Inventions, and Where It Fits Google's open-weight LLM family, walked generation by generation. Distillation, local attention, effective parameters — the invention behind each release — plus the licensing detail that turns into an incident if you miss it, and how to actually run one on your own machine with Ollama. 02 ·Model Families·FREE·9 min read The Llama Family from Scratch — The Main Line of Open LLMs How Meta's Llama became the main line of open LLMs. The contrarian bet behind Llama 1, the lineage running through Llama 3.x, the llama.cpp / GGUF / Ollama ecosystem that grew around it, and the licensing traps to read before you ship commercially — starting from no prior knowledge. 03 ·Model Families·★ MEMBER·7 min read The Qwen Family from Scratch — Why It Tops Hugging Face's Download Charts Alibaba Cloud's Qwen is a fixture at the top of Hugging Face's download charts. From Qwen2.5's every-size-plus-specialist catalog strategy to Qwen3's thinking mode and MoE, this guide covers the lineage, why it excels at multilingual and code work, and the pitfalls that bite in production — assuming zero prior knowledge. 04 ·Model Families·FREE·9 min read The DeepSeek Family from Scratch — Breaking In with MoE and Distillation DeepSeek redrew the open-LLM map with four tools: MoE, MLA, GRPO, and distillation. Walk the V2/V3/R1 lineage from zero prerequisites, learn how to read that famous training-cost number, and find out what the distilled models are actually for. 05 ·Model Families·★ MEMBER·9 min read The GPT Lineage — Design Thinking from GPT-1 to Today A generation-by-generation walk from GPT-1 to GPT-4o and the reasoning models, asking what changed and what deliberately did not. At the centre sits one machine that only ever predicts the next token; what moved was scale, the order of training, and how the output was disciplined. 06 ·Model Families·★ MEMBER·9 min read The Mistral Family from Scratch — Europe's Small-and-Strong Bet How a Paris startup made 'small but strong' work: the sliding-window attention behind Mistral 7B, the sparse mixture of experts behind Mixtral, the Codestral code line, and the licence policy that started at Apache 2.0 and then wandered — explained from no prior knowledge. 07 ·Model Families·★ MEMBER·11 min read Open vs Closed — The Economics of Releasing Weights, and the Safety Argument Why would a company give away weights that cost a fortune to train? The decisive difference between open-weight and open-source, the licence clauses that actually cause incidents, and what each side of the release debate is really claiming — plus the convergence nobody expected. From no prior knowledge.