The State Of LLMs 2025: Progress, Progress, and Predictions

A 2025 review of large language models, from DeepSeek R1 and RLVR to inference-time scaling, benchmarks, architectures, and predictions for 2026.

The State Of LLMs 2025: Progress, Problems, and Predictions Sebastian Raschka, PhD Dec 30, 2025 531 38 55 Share As 2025 comes to a close, I want to look back at some of the year’s most important developments in large language models, reflect on the limitations and open problems that remain, and share a few thoughts on what might come next. As I tend to say every year, 2025 was a very eventful year for LLMs and AI, and this year, there was no sign of progress saturating or slowing down. 1. The Year of Reasoning, RLVR, and GRPO There are many interesting topics I want to cover, but let’s start c

related reading

• 2025 LLM Year in Review – karpathykarpathy.bearblog.dev
• 2025: The year in LLMssimonwillison.net
• What We’ve Learned From A Year of Building with LLMs – Applied LLMsapplied-llms.org
• DeepSeek-R1arxiv.org
• The Big LLM Architecture Comparisonmagazine.sebastianraschka.com
• AI in 2025: gestalt — LessWronglesswrong.com
• The State of Reinforcement Learning for LLM Reasoningmagazine.sebastianraschka.com
• The State of LLM Reasoning Model Inferencesebastianraschka.com
• State of RL for reasoning LLMs | A. Weersaweers.de
• [2510.13786] The Art of Scaling Reinforcement Learning Compute for LLMsarxiv.org
• Understanding Reasoning LLMs - by Sebastian Raschka, PhDsebastianraschka.com
• State of AI 2025: 100T Token LLM Usage Study | OpenRouteropenrouter.ai