The Best Free AI Models Right Now (Including the 1.6T One From a Food-Delivery App)

You do not need a paid plan to use world-class AI. Some of the strongest models today are completely free.

One of them has 1.6 trillion parameters. And it comes from a food-delivery company. Not a joke.

Here are the 5 best free AI models right now, with links.

1. LongCat 2.0 — The 1.6T Monster From Meituan

Meituan is China’s biggest food-delivery app. They also built LongCat 2.0 — a 1.6-trillion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts model. It is released under the MIT license, which means fully open source.

Here is the fun part. Before launch, it ran anonymously as “Owl Alpha” and topped the OpenRouter leaderboards, per press reports. People loved it before they even knew who made it.

You can chat with it free at longcat.ai. Try it on hard reasoning and coding tasks. It is shockingly good.

2. DeepSeek — The Free Reasoning Workhorse

DeepSeek made AI cheap for the whole world. Its free tier at deepseek.com gives you strong reasoning and coding.

Great for: debugging, maths, step-by-step explanations. Use it when you want the model to think out loud.

3. Qwen — Alibaba’s Free All-Rounder

Qwen is Alibaba’s model family. Chat free at chat.qwen.ai.

Great for: multilingual work, long documents, and coding. The Qwen coder models are among the best open models for programming.

4. Gemini — Google’s Generous Free Tier

Google gives you Gemini free at aistudio.google.com. The free tier includes API access — perfect for student projects.

Great for: huge context windows, working with images and video, and building your first AI app without spending a rupee.

5. Llama on Groq — The Fastest Free Inference

Meta’s Llama models run free on groq.com. Groq’s chips serve responses at insane speed — hundreds of tokens per second.

Great for: chatbots and apps where speed matters. The free tier is enough for demos and college projects.

Which One Should You Pick?

Simple rules:

• Hardest problems → LongCat 2.0 or DeepSeek
• Coding help → Qwen or DeepSeek
• Building an app with a free API → Gemini (AI Studio) or Llama on Groq
• Speed demos → Llama on Groq

All five are free. Try each one for a day. Keep the two you like.

Your Turn

Bookmark these five links. Next time someone says “AI is expensive”, send them this post.

The models are free. The skill of using them well — that is what you build.