Top Large Language Models (LLMs): A Comprehensive Ranking of AI Giants Across 13 Metrics Including Multitask Reasoning, Coding, Math, Latency, Zero-Shot and Few-Shot Learning, and Many More

The competition to develop the most advanced Large Language Models (LLMs) has seen major advancements, with the four AI giants, OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind, at the forefront. These LLMs are reshaping industries and significantly impacting the AI-powered applications we use daily, such as virtual assistants, customer support chatbots, and translation services. As competition heats up, these models are constantly evolving, becoming more efficient and capable in various domains, including multitask reasoning, coding, mathematical problem-solving, and performance in real-time applications.

The Rise of Large Language Models

LLMs are built using vast amounts of data and intricate neural networks, allowing them to understand and generate human-like text accurately. These models are the pillar for generative AI applications that range from simple text completion to more complex problem-solving, like generating high-quality programming code or even performing mathematical calculations.

As the demand for AI applications grows, so does the pressure on tech giants to produce more accurate, versatile, and efficient LLMs. In 2024, some of the most critical benchmarks for evaluating these models include Multitask Reasoning (MMLU), coding accuracy (HumanEval), mathematical proficiency (MATH), and latency (TTFT, or time to first token). Cost-efficiency and token context windows are also becoming critical as more companies seek scalable AI solutions.

Best in Multitask Reasoning (MMLU)

The MMLU (Massive Multitask Language Understanding) benchmark is a comprehensive test that evaluates an AI model’s ability to answer questions from various subjects, including science, humanities, and mathematics. The top performers in this category demonstrate the versatility required to handle diverse real-world tasks.

• GPT-4o is the leader in multitask reasoning, with an impressive score of 88.7%. Built by OpenAI, It builds on the strengths of its predecessor, GPT -4, and is designed for general-purpose tasks, making it a versatile model for academic and professional applications.
• Llama 3.1 405b, the next iteration of Meta’s Llama series, follows closely behind with 88.6%. Known for its lightweight architecture, Llama 3.1 is engineered to perform efficiently while maintaining competitive accuracy across various domains.
• Claude 3.5 Sonnet from Anthropic rounds out the top three with 88.3%, proving its capabilities in natural language understanding and reinforcing its presence as a model designed with safety and ethical considerations at its core.

Best in Coding (HumanEval)

As programming continues to play a vital role in automation, AI’s ability to assist developers in writing correct and efficient code is more important than ever. The HumanEval benchmark evaluates a model’s ability to generate accurate code across multiple programming tasks.

• Claude 3.5 Sonnet takes the crown here with a 92% accuracy rate, solidifying its reputation as a string tool for developers looking to streamline their coding workflows. Claude’s emphasis on generating ethical and robust solutions has made it particularly appealing in safety-critical environments, such as healthcare and finance.
• Although GPT-4o is slightly behind in the coding race with 90.2%, it remains a strong contender, particularly with its ability to handle large-scale enterprise applications. Its coding capabilities are well-rounded, and it continues to support various programming languages and frameworks.
• Llama 3.1 405b scores 89%, making it a reliable option for developers seeking cost-efficient models for real-time code generation tasks. Meta’s focus on improving code efficiency and minimizing latency has contributed to Llama’s steady rise in this category.

Best in Math (MATH)

The MATH benchmark tests an LLM’s ability to solve complex mathematical problems and understand numerical concepts. This skill is critical for finance, engineering, and scientific research applications.

• GPT-4o again leads the pack with a 76.6% score, showcasing its mathematical prowess. OpenAI’s continuous updates have improved its ability to solve advanced mathematical equations and handle abstract numerical reasoning, making it the go-to model for industries that rely on precision.
• Llama 3.1 405b comes in second with 73.8%, demonstrating its potential as a more lightweight yet effective alternative for mathematics-heavy industries. Meta has invested heavily in optimizing its architecture to perform well in tasks requiring logical deduction and numerical accuracy.
• GPT-Turbo, another variant from OpenAI’s GPT family, holds its ground with a 72.6% score. While it may not be the top choice for solving the most complex math problems, it is still a solid option for those who need faster response times and cost-effective deployment.

Lowest Latency (TTFT)

Latency, which is how quickly a model generates a response, is critical for real-time applications like chatbots or virtual assistants. The Time to First Token (TTFT) benchmark measures the speed at which an AI model begins outputting a response after receiving a prompt.

• Llama 3.1 8b excels with an incredible latency of 0.3 seconds, making it ideal for applications where response time is critical. This model is built to perform under pressure, ensuring minimal delay in real-time interactions.
• GPT-3.5-T follows with a respectable 0.4 seconds, balancing speed and accuracy. It provides a competitive edge for developers who prioritize quick interactions without sacrificing too much comprehension or complexity.
• Llama 3.1 70b also achieves a 0.4-second latency, making it a reliable option for large-scale deployments that require both speed and scalability. Meta’s investment in optimizing response times has paid off, particularly in customer-facing applications where milliseconds matter.

Cheapest Models

In the era of cost-conscious AI development, affordability is a key factor for enterprises looking to integrate LLMs into their operations. The models below offer some of the most competitive pricing in the market.

• Llama 3.1 8b tops the affordability chart with a usage cost of $0.05 (input) / $0.08 (output), making it a lucrative option for small businesses and startups looking for high-performance AI at a fraction of the cost of other models.
• Gemini 1.5 Flash is close behind, offering $0.07 (input) / $0.3 (output) rates. Known for its large context window (as we’ll explore further), this model is designed for enterprises that require detailed analysis and larger data processing capacities at a lower cost.
• GPT-4o-mini offers a reasonable alternative with $0.15 (input) / $0.6 (output), targeting enterprises that need the power of OpenAI’s GPT family without the hefty price tag.

Largest Context Window

The context window of an LLM defines the amount of text it can consider at once when generating a response. Models with larger context windows are crucial for long-form generation applications, such as legal document analysis, academic research, and customer service.

• Gemini 1.5 Flash is the current leader with an astounding 1,000,000 tokens. This capability allows users to feed in entire books, research papers, or extensive customer service logs without breaking the context, offering unprecedented utility for large-scale text generation tasks.
• Claude 3/3.5 comes in second, handling 200,000 tokens. Anthropic’s focus on maintaining coherence across long conversations or documents makes this model a powerful tool in industries that rely on continuous dialogue or legal document reviews.
• GPT-4 Turbo + GPT-4o family can process 128,000 tokens, which is still a significant leap compared to earlier models. These models are tailored for applications that demand substantial context retention while maintaining high accuracy and relevance.

Factual Accuracy

Factual accuracy has become a critical metric as LLMs are increasingly used in knowledge-driven tasks like medical diagnosis, legal document summarization, and academic research. The accuracy with which an AI model recalls factual information without introducing hallucinations directly impacts its reliability.

• Claude 3.5 Sonnet performs exceptionally well, with accuracy rates around 92.5% on fact-checking tests. Anthropic has emphasized building models that are efficient and grounded in verified information, which is key for ethical AI applications.
• GPT-4o follows with an accuracy of 90%. OpenAI’s vast dataset helps ensure that GPT-4o pulls from up-to-date and reliable sources of information, making it particularly useful in research-heavy tasks.
• Llama 3.1 405b achieves an 88.8% accuracy rate, thanks to Meta’s continued investment in refining the dataset and improving model grounding. However, it is known to struggle with less popular or niche subjects.

Truthfulness and Alignment

The truthfulness metric evaluates how well models align their output with known facts. Alignment ensures that models behave according to predefined ethical guidelines, avoiding harmful, biased, or toxic outputs.

• Claude 3.5’s Sonnet again shines with a 91% truthfulness score thanks to Anthropic’s unique alignment research. Claude is designed with safety protocols in mind, ensuring its responses are factual and aligned with ethical standards.
• GPT-4o scores 89.5% in truthfulness, showing that it mostly provides high-quality answers but occasionally may hallucinate or give speculative responses when faced with insufficient context.
• Llama 3.1 405b earns 87.7% in this area, performing well in general tasks but struggling when pushed to its limits in controversial or highly complex issues. Meta continues to enhance its alignment capabilities.

Safety and Robustness Against Adversarial Prompts

In addition to alignment, LLMs must resist adversarial prompts, inputs designed to make the model generate harmful, biased, or nonsensical outputs.

• Claude 3.5 Sonnet ranks highest with a 93% safety score, making it highly resistant to adversarial attacks. Its robust guardrails help prevent the model from providing harmful or toxic outputs, making it suitable for sensitive use cases in sectors like education and healthcare.
• GPT-4o trails slightly at 90%, maintaining strong defenses but showing some vulnerability to more sophisticated adversarial inputs.
• Llama 3.1 405b scores 88%, a respectable performance, but the model has been reported to exhibit occasional biases when presented with complex, adversarially framed queries. Meta is likely to improve in this area as the model evolves.

Robustness in Multilingual Performance

As more industries operate globally, LLMs must perform well across multiple languages. Multilingual performance metrics assess a model’s ability to generate coherent, accurate, and context-aware responses in non-English languages.

• GPT-4o is the leader in multilingual capabilities, scoring 92% on the XGLUE benchmark (a multilingual extension of GLUE). OpenAI’s fine-tuning across various languages, dialects, and regional contexts ensures that GPT-4o can effectively serve users worldwide.
• Claude 3.5 Sonnet follows with 89%, optimized primarily for Western and major Asian languages. However, its performance dips slightly in low-resource languages, which Anthropic is working to address.
• Llama 3.1 405b has an 86% score, demonstrating strong performance in widely spoken languages like Spanish, Mandarin, and French but struggling in dialects or less-documented languages.

Knowledge Retention and Long-Form Generation

As the demand for large-scale content generation grows, LLMs’ knowledge retention and long-form generation abilities are tested by writing research papers, legal documents, and long conversations with continuous context.

• Claude 3.5 Sonnet takes the top spot with a 95% knowledge retention score. It excels in long-form generation, where maintaining continuity and coherence over extended text is crucial. Its high token capacity (200,000 tokens) enables it to generate high-quality long-form content without losing context.
• GPT-4o follows closely with 92%, performing exceptionally well when producing research papers or technical documentation. However, its slightly smaller context window (128,000 tokens) than Claude’s means it occasionally struggles with large input texts.
• Gemini 1.5 Flash performs admirably in knowledge retention, with a 91% score. It particularly benefits from its staggering 1,000,000 token capacity, making it ideal for tasks where extensive documents or large datasets must be analyzed in a single pass.

Zero-Shot and Few-Shot Learning

In real-world scenarios, LLMs are often tasked with generating responses without explicitly training on similar tasks (zero-shot) or with limited task-specific examples (few-shot).

• GPT-4o remains the best performer in zero-shot learning, with an accuracy of 88.5%. OpenAI has optimized GPT-4o for general-purpose tasks, making it highly versatile across domains without additional fine-tuning.
• Claude 3.5 Sonnet scores 86% in zero-shot learning, demonstrating its capacity to generalize well across a wide range of unseen tasks. However, it slightly lags in specific technical domains compared to GPT-4o.
• Llama 3.1 405b achieves 84%, offering strong generalization abilities, though it sometimes struggles in few-shot scenarios, particularly in niche or highly specialized tasks.

Ethical Considerations and Bias Reduction

The ethical considerations of LLMs, particularly in minimizing bias and avoiding toxic outputs, are becoming increasingly important.

• Claude 3.5 Sonnet is widely regarded as the most ethically aligned LLM, with a 93% score in bias reduction and safety against toxic outputs. Anthropic’s continuous focus on ethical AI has resulted in a model that performs well and adheres to ethical standards, reducing the likelihood of biased or harmful content.
• GPT-4o has a 91% score, maintaining high ethical standards and ensuring its outputs are safe for a wide range of audiences, although some marginal biases still exist in certain scenarios.
• Llama 3.1 405b scores 89%, showing substantial progress in bias reduction but still trailing behind Claude and GPT-4o. Meta continues to refine its bias mitigation techniques, particularly for sensitive topics.

Conclusion

With these metrics comparison and analysis, it becomes clear that the competition among the top LLMs is fierce, and each model excels in different areas. Claude 3.5 Sonnet leads in coding, safety, and long-form content generation, while GPT-4o remains the top choice for multitask reasoning, mathematical prowess, and multilingual performance. Llama 3.1 405b from Meta continues to impress with its cost-effectiveness, speed, and versatility. It is a solid choice for those looking to deploy AI solutions at scale without breaking the bank.