Dense models grow rarer in 2025

The joke lands because dense models have gone from default choice to special event, which says a lot about where the compute and product incentives are headed.

• –Dense checkpoints are still easier to serve, quantize, and debug than MoE systems, so they remain the cleanest option for local deployers.
• –Qwen2.5-VL-32B and Seed-OSS-36B show that dense releases are still alive in multimodal and long-context open-weight model lines.
• –The scarcity is the point: most labs now chase efficiency or frontier scale with MoE, so dense launches feel unusually memorable.
• –For builders, that means fewer “safe” local models to pick from, but the best dense releases can still feel more coherent than smaller, noisier alternatives.