AI is given a name when the AI Product finds Market Fit

Calling 2025 “the year of AI model architectures” feels a bit like saying “you should add ‘Reddit’ to your Google search to get better results.”

It’s not wrong. It’s just… a little late to the conversation.

Here’s how long these model types have actually been around:
•   LLMs – 2018 (GPT-2, BERT)
•   MLMs – 2018 (BERT, the original bidirectional model)
•   MoE – 2017–2021 (Switch Transformer, GShard)
•   VLMs – 2020–2021 (CLIP, DALL·E)
•   SLMs – 2022–2023 (DistilBERT, TinyGPT, Phi-2)
•   SAMs – 2023 (Meta’s Segment Anything)
•   LAMs – 2024–2025 (Tool-using agents, Gemini, GPT-4o)
•   LCMs – 2024–2025 (Meta’s SONAR embedding space)

These aren’t new ideas. They’re rebrands of ideas that finally hit product-market-fit.