2025 Open-Weight LLM Guide: Architecture Innovations and Practical Deployment

The 2025 Landscape of Open-Weight Large Language Models: A Plain-English Tour from DeepSeek-V3 to Kimi 2 “Seven years after the first GPT paper, are we still stacking the same Lego blocks?” “Which model can I actually run on a single RTX 4090?” “What do MoE, MLA, NoPE, and QK-Norm mean for my weekend side-project?” This article answers those questions in plain language. Every fact, number, and code snippet comes from the official papers or repositories of the eight model families discussed—no outside sources, no hype. Table of Contents Why Architecture Still Matters in 2025 One Map, Eight Models Model-by-Model Walk-Through …