Comparison of Contemporary Large Language Models
This blog presents a concise structural comparison of four prominent large language models: GPT, Claude, Gemini, and xAI. Although all are built on Transformer -based foundations, they differ markedly in mathematical design, alignment strategy, training dynamics, and multimodal architecture. GPT (OpenAI) follows a scaling-law paradigm using a Transformer backbone enhanced by s parse Mixture-of-Experts layers. Claude (Anthropic) preserves the same basic architecture but introduces Constitutional AI, an alignment method that incorporates explicit behavioral constraints. Gemini (Google) adopts a unified multimodal Transformer that represents text, images, audio, and video within a single token sequence. xAI's Grok retains the Transformer form but is trained on a non-stationary, continuously shifting real-time data stream, giving it distinct temporal behavior. As a disclaimer, I am not a practitioner in this area; my background is ...