Inside 2025’s LLM Revolution: From GPT-2 to Kimi 2 Architectures Explained

From GPT-2 to Kimi 2: A Visual Guide to 2025’s Leading Large Language Model Architectures If you already use large language models but still get lost in technical jargon, this post is for you. In one long read you’ll learn: Why DeepSeek-V3’s 671 B parameters run cheaper than Llama 3’s 405 B How sliding-window attention lets a 27 B model run on a Mac Mini Which open-weight model to download for your next side project Table of Contents Seven Years of the Same Backbone—What Actually Changed? DeepSeek-V3 / R1: MLA + MoE, the Memory-Saving Duo OLMo 2: Moving RMSNorm One …