They won't ever be SOTA due to money, but "last year's SOTA" when it costs 1/4 or less, may be good enough. More quantity, more flexibility, at lower edge quality. It can make sense. A 7% dumber agent TEAM Vs. a single objectively superior super-agent.
That's the most exciting thing going on in that space. New workflows opening up not due to intelligence improvements but cost improvements for "good enough" intelligence.
Why should anyone waste time on poorer results? I'd rather pay my $200/mo because my time matters. I'm not a poor college student anymore, and I need more return on my time.
I'm not shitting on open weights here - I want open source to win. I just don't see how that's possible.
It's like Photoshop vs. Gimp. Not only is the Gimp UX awful, but it didn't even offer (maybe still doesn't?) full bit depth support. For a hacker with free time, that's fine. But if my primary job function is to transform graphics in exchange for money, I'm paying for the better tool. Gimp is entirely a no-go in a professional setting.
Or it's like Google Docs / Microsoft Office vs. LibreOffice. LibreOffice is still pretty trash compared to the big tools. It's not just that Google and Microsoft have more money, but their products are involved in larger scale feedback loops that refine the product much more quickly.
But with weights it's even worse than bad UX. These open weights models just aren't as smart. They're not getting RLHF'd on real world data. The developers of these open weights models can game benchmarks, but the actual intelligence for real world problems is lacking. And that's unfortunately the part that actually matters.
Again, to be clear: I hate this. I want open. I just don't see how it will ever be able to catch up to full-featured products.
The trick is going to be recognizing tasks which have some ceiling on what they need and which will therefore eventually be doable by open models, and those which can always be done better if you add a bit more intelligence.
This kind of rhetoric is not helpful. If you want to make a point, then make one, but this adds nothing to the conversation. Maybe open source models don't work for you. They work very well for me.
I'm not disagreeing per-se but if you think the benchmarks are flawed and "my real world usage" is more reflective of model capabilities, why not write some benchmarks of your own?
You stand to make a lot of money and gain a lot of clout in the industry if you've figured out a better way to measure model capability, maybe the frontier labs would hire you.
Because in almost no real-world project is "programming time" the limiting factor?
The gap has been shrinking with each release, and the SOTA has already run into diminishing returns for each extra unit of data+computation it uses.
Do you really want to bet that the gap will not eventually be a hairs breadth?
When was the last time you used any of them? Because, a lot of people are actively using them for 9-5 work today, I count myself in that group. That opinion feels outdated, like it was formed a year ago+ and held onto. Or based on highly quantized versions and or small non-Thinking models.
Do you really think Qwen3.6 for a specific example is "50%" as good as Opus4.7? Opus4.7 is clearly and objectively better, no debate on that, but the gap isn't anywhere near that wide. I'd call "20%" hyperbole, the true difference is difficult to exactly measure but sub-10% for their top-tier Thinking models is likely.
Sure, we use Google Drive, too, but that's just for sharing documents across offices, not for everyday use. For that, the open source model is a clear winner in my book.
So the starting point is Opus 4.7 pricing and we're contrasting alternatives near the top end (offered across multiple providers).
Also I said 20% was hyperbole, meaning far too high.
The breakeven at this price is 6 minutes of productivity per work day for an engineer making $200k.
Are you suggesting that someone making $20k should be spending $200/mo on Claude?
If you pay someone $20,000 for labor, and they save 65 minutes worth of labor per day using a $200/mo Claude subscription, you are better off buying the Claude subscription.
You've got the real insight with this claim.
This is the way the world is moving. Open source isn't even going where the ball is being tossed. There is no leadership here.
You're spot on.
If the cost to deliver a unit of business automation is:
A. $1M with human labor
B. $700k human labor + open source models
C. $500k human labor + $10,000 in claude code max (duration of project)
D. $250k with humans + $200k claude code "mythos ultra"
Your poor college students and hobbyists will be on option "B". But this won't be as productive as evidenced by the human labor input costs.
Option "C" will begin to disappear as models/compute get more expensive and capable.
Option "A" will be nonviable. Humans just won't be able to keep up.
Open source strictly depends on models decreasing their capability gap. But I'm not seeing it.
Targeting home hardware is the biggest smell. It's showing that this is non-serious, hobby tinkery and has no real role in business.
For open source to work and not to turn into a toy, the models need to target data center deployment.
The real money in this market, though, is going to be made in the C suite, and they don't really care about the model. They don't care if it's open source, closed source, or what it is. They don't want to buy a model. They're interested in buying a solution to their problems. They're not going to be afraid of a software price tag -- any number they spend on labor is far more.
Labor is something like 50%+ of the Fortune 500's operating expenses -- capturing any chunk of this is a ridiculous sum of money.
Who said so? GLM 5.1 is 90% Opus, at least. Some people quite happy with Kimi 2.6 too. I did not try Deepseek 4 yet but also hearing it is as good as Opus. You might be confusing open source models with local models. It is not easy to run a 1.6T model locally, but they are not 50% of SOTA models.