With RAM prices spiking, there's no way consumers are going to have access to frontier quality models on local hardware any time soon, simply because they won't fit.

That's not the same as discounting the open weight models though. I use DeepSeek 3.2 heavily, and was impressed by the Devstral launch recently. (I tried Kimi K2 and was less impressed). I don't use them for coding so much as for other purposes... but the key thing about them is that they're cheap on API providers. I put $15 into my deepseek platform account two months ago, use it all the time, and still have $8 left.

I think the open weight models are 8 months behind the frontier models, and that's awesome. Especially when you consider you can fine tune them for a given problem domain...