I think it's interesting that people write off open weight models because they're "a few months behind" proprietary models.
I know LLMs move at the speed of light (especially these past few quarters), but if Opus and GPT "a few months ago" were really like open weight models, then there's really no reason to not switch, especially for those who were using these models a few months ago.
Your codebase didn't change, so use the open weight model. Don't move the goalposts.
Every new proprietary model is "groundbreaking" and "look, it just solved task X that no other model could solve," only to be referred to as "that crappy previous-generation model" a month later.
So yeah, I'm totally fine using Kimi-2.7, GLM-5.2 or Deepseek-v4. I think we've already hit the ceiling and most improvements now seem to be from harness improvements and slightly better RL to improve reasoning/tool calling.
For that matter, the new models are shit. If I’m using Opus 4.6 anyway to get anything actually done, then great, we’re actually entirely caught up then.
> I think it's interesting that people write off open weight models because they're "a few months behind" proprietary models.
The really interesting thing is that it's typically those very same accounts who were explaining, a few months ago, that thanks to their commercial model they were gaining so much time and producing so much fantastic code.
A few months passes and suddenly the open-source model have caught up with the models that were gaining them so much time and that produced amazing code (in production everywhere for sure btw) but... It's impossible to work with these models.
Rinse and repeat.
The current models, according to them, are basically AGI and they can go fishing while paid subscriptions solve the world's problems.
But when it six months there shall be new closed, pricey, models and when the open ones shall have reach the level of Fable, we'll hear how it's impossible to work in late 2026 on a model that is "only at the level of Fable".
These people should have been snake-oil salesmen (and it could be what they actually are).
Open source models are still not good enough for now, but with the current speed of one new SOTA every two months, by this time next year we will definitely have cheap open source models at least as good as Fable :)
Have you read about Opencode Go? They are great provider for open model, like GLM 5.2, Deepseek v4 Pro, Kimi 2.7 Code. You should give it shot to them :-)
I think the frontier will command premium for sometime just as slight better software developers were 10x's vs their peers as their architecture & development strategies and code approach compounded quickly. One less error per block of work compounds quickly.
Sure, there may be some cases and reasons for local models and industry is so large they will continue to make progress and gather economic value and users for specific use case; but frontier will command vast majority of the economic value distinct from Linux and open source where the model created better than proriatary economic incentives around development
Ultimately its a financial game. Open source is far cheaper so it already has an upper-hand. Frontier models have to justify financially why they are worth the additional spend.
yeah, on a 96GB Mac Studio and Gemma+Qwen, it's definitely fully doable. fully doable but not really for coding on 16GB. but svelter models and cheaper (eventually) hardware are coming!
"cheaper (eventually) hardware"
Best case 2-3 years from now. Otherwise it will take a major global recession to get us anywhere near last year's prices.
>There was a time not too long ago when using Linux entailed some professional risk1. First there was compatibility: you may not have been able to render a Word document or PowerPoint correctly, and you might have had to trust Open Office’s export capability to render docs the way you wanted
For a while during this era, I used to port my laptops windows installation into a virtual machine that can run on Linux. It took a bit of hacking away but I could usually do it in a day or two. Then its all Linux with the windows vm being used for the microsoft stuff.
I know LLMs move at the speed of light (especially these past few quarters), but if Opus and GPT "a few months ago" were really like open weight models, then there's really no reason to not switch, especially for those who were using these models a few months ago.
Your codebase didn't change, so use the open weight model. Don't move the goalposts.
So yeah, I'm totally fine using Kimi-2.7, GLM-5.2 or Deepseek-v4. I think we've already hit the ceiling and most improvements now seem to be from harness improvements and slightly better RL to improve reasoning/tool calling.
The really interesting thing is that it's typically those very same accounts who were explaining, a few months ago, that thanks to their commercial model they were gaining so much time and producing so much fantastic code.
A few months passes and suddenly the open-source model have caught up with the models that were gaining them so much time and that produced amazing code (in production everywhere for sure btw) but... It's impossible to work with these models.
Rinse and repeat.
The current models, according to them, are basically AGI and they can go fishing while paid subscriptions solve the world's problems.
But when it six months there shall be new closed, pricey, models and when the open ones shall have reach the level of Fable, we'll hear how it's impossible to work in late 2026 on a model that is "only at the level of Fable".
These people should have been snake-oil salesmen (and it could be what they actually are).
Sure, there may be some cases and reasons for local models and industry is so large they will continue to make progress and gather economic value and users for specific use case; but frontier will command vast majority of the economic value distinct from Linux and open source where the model created better than proriatary economic incentives around development
Ultimately its a financial game. Open source is far cheaper so it already has an upper-hand. Frontier models have to justify financially why they are worth the additional spend.
and what hardware are you using?
For a while during this era, I used to port my laptops windows installation into a virtual machine that can run on Linux. It took a bit of hacking away but I could usually do it in a day or two. Then its all Linux with the windows vm being used for the microsoft stuff.
I enjoyed the first part though