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Ultimate Guide - The Best Open Source LLMs for Summarization in 2025

Author
Guest Blog by

Elizabeth C.

Our definitive guide to the best open source LLMs for summarization in 2025. We've partnered with industry insiders, tested performance on key benchmarks, and analyzed architectures to uncover the very best models for text summarization tasks. From state-of-the-art reasoning models and long-context specialists to efficient lightweight options, these models excel in innovation, accessibility, and real-world summarization applications—helping developers and businesses build powerful content processing tools with services like SiliconFlow. Our top three recommendations for 2025 are Qwen/Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507, GLM-4.5V, and OpenAI's GPT-OSS-120B—each chosen for their outstanding text comprehension, context handling, and ability to push the boundaries of open source summarization capabilities.



What are Open Source LLMs for Summarization?

Open source LLMs for summarization are specialized Large Language Models designed to compress long-form text into concise, coherent summaries while preserving key information. Using advanced transformer architectures and reasoning capabilities, they process documents, articles, reports, and other text content to extract essential points and present them in a digestible format. These models enable developers and organizations to automate content analysis, accelerate information processing, and democratize access to powerful text summarization tools, supporting applications from research and journalism to business intelligence and content management.

Qwen/Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507

Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507 is an updated Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model with 30.5 billion total parameters and 3.3 billion activated parameters. This version features significant improvements in text comprehension, logical reasoning, and instruction following, making it exceptional for summarization tasks. With enhanced long-context understanding up to 256K tokens and markedly better alignment with user preferences, it delivers high-quality text generation and comprehensive document analysis.

Subtype:
Text Summarization
Developer:Qwen

Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507: Advanced Long-Context Summarization

Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507 is an updated Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model with 30.5 billion total parameters and 3.3 billion activated parameters. This version features key enhancements, including significant improvements in general capabilities such as instruction following, logical reasoning, text comprehension, mathematics, science, coding, and tool usage. It shows substantial gains in long-tail knowledge coverage across multiple languages and offers markedly better alignment with user preferences in subjective and open-ended tasks, enabling more helpful responses and higher-quality text generation. Its capabilities in long-context understanding have been enhanced to 256K tokens, making it ideal for summarizing lengthy documents.

Pros

  • Enhanced 256K long-context understanding for comprehensive documents.
  • Efficient MoE architecture with only 3.3B active parameters.
  • Superior text comprehension and logical reasoning capabilities.

Cons

  • Non-thinking mode only, without step-by-step reasoning blocks.
  • May require technical expertise for optimal deployment.

Why We Love It

  • It combines exceptional long-context processing with efficient resource usage, making it perfect for summarizing extensive documents while maintaining high quality and accuracy.

GLM-4.5V

GLM-4.5V is the latest generation vision-language model released by Zhipu AI, built upon GLM-4.5-Air with 106B total parameters and 12B active parameters. Using a Mixture-of-Experts architecture, it excels at processing diverse content including images, videos, and long documents. With its 'Thinking Mode' switch and state-of-the-art performance on 41 multimodal benchmarks, it's ideal for comprehensive content summarization across multiple formats.

Subtype:
Multimodal Summarization
Developer:zai

GLM-4.5V: Multimodal Content Summarization Leader

GLM-4.5V is the latest generation vision-language model (VLM) released by Zhipu AI. The model is built upon the flagship text model GLM-4.5-Air, which has 106B total parameters and 12B active parameters, utilizing a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture to achieve superior performance at lower inference cost. It introduces innovations like 3D Rotated Positional Encoding (3D-RoPE), significantly enhancing its perception and reasoning abilities. The model is capable of processing diverse visual content such as images, videos, and long documents, achieving state-of-the-art performance among open-source models on 41 public multimodal benchmarks. The 'Thinking Mode' switch allows users to balance efficiency and effectiveness for different summarization needs.

Pros

  • Multimodal capabilities for text, image, and video summarization.
  • Flexible 'Thinking Mode' for balancing speed vs. depth.
  • State-of-the-art performance on 41 multimodal benchmarks.

Cons

  • Smaller context window compared to text-only specialists.
  • Higher complexity for simple text-only summarization tasks.

Why We Love It

  • It revolutionizes content summarization by seamlessly processing multiple content types, making it perfect for modern multimedia document analysis and comprehensive content understanding.

OpenAI GPT-OSS-120B

GPT-OSS-120B is OpenAI's open-weight large language model with ~117B parameters (5.1B active), using a Mixture-of-Experts design and MXFP4 quantization to run on a single 80 GB GPU. It delivers exceptional performance in reasoning, coding, health, and math benchmarks, with full Chain-of-Thought (CoT) capabilities and Apache 2.0-licensed commercial deployment support, making it ideal for enterprise summarization applications.

Subtype:
Enterprise Summarization
Developer:openai

OpenAI GPT-OSS-120B: Enterprise-Grade Summarization Powerhouse

GPT-OSS-120B is OpenAI's open-weight large language model with ~117B parameters (5.1B active), using a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) design and MXFP4 quantization to run on a single 80 GB GPU. It delivers exceptional performance matching or exceeding industry standards in reasoning, coding, health, and math benchmarks. With full Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, comprehensive tool use capabilities, and Apache 2.0-licensed commercial deployment support, this model provides enterprise-ready summarization solutions with the reliability and performance expected from OpenAI's technology stack.

Pros

  • Enterprise-grade performance with Apache 2.0 licensing.
  • Efficient single-GPU deployment on 80 GB hardware.
  • Full Chain-of-Thought reasoning for detailed summaries.

Cons

  • Requires significant computational resources (80 GB GPU).
  • Higher inference costs compared to smaller models.

Why We Love It

  • It brings OpenAI's cutting-edge technology to open-source summarization, offering enterprise-level performance with commercial licensing freedom for demanding business applications.

LLM Summarization Model Comparison

In this table, we compare 2025's leading open source LLMs for summarization, each with unique strengths. For long-document processing, Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507 offers exceptional context handling. For multimodal content summarization, GLM-4.5V provides unmatched versatility, while OpenAI GPT-OSS-120B delivers enterprise-grade performance with commercial licensing. This side-by-side view helps you choose the right model for your specific summarization requirements.

Number Model Developer Subtype Pricing (SiliconFlow)Core Strength
1Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507QwenText Summarization$0.4 Output / $0.1 Input per M Tokens256K long-context processing
2GLM-4.5VzaiMultimodal Summarization$0.86 Output / $0.14 Input per M TokensMultimodal content understanding
3GPT-OSS-120BopenaiEnterprise Summarization$0.45 Output / $0.09 Input per M TokensEnterprise-grade performance

Frequently Asked Questions

Our top three picks for 2025 are Qwen/Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507, GLM-4.5V, and OpenAI GPT-OSS-120B. Each of these models stood out for their exceptional text comprehension, context handling capabilities, and unique approaches to solving challenges in content summarization and information extraction.

Our analysis shows distinct leaders for different needs. Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507 excels at processing lengthy documents with its 256K context window. GLM-4.5V is perfect for multimedia content requiring image and video analysis alongside text. GPT-OSS-120B provides the most reliable performance for enterprise applications requiring consistent, high-quality summaries.

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