> Local modals are 6 months to 18 months behind frontier.

I wish this was true but it is not. And I am working on open source models so if anything, I would have a bias towards agreeing with you.

Frontier closed models (GPT/Claude) are gaining distance to everybody else. Even Google, once the king.

Your claim is a meme coming from benchmark results and sadly a lot of models are benchmaxxed. Llama 4, and most notably the Grok 3 drama with a lot of layoffs. And Chinese big tech... well they have some cultural issues.

"Qwen's base models live in a very exam-heavy basin - distinct from other base models like llama/gemma. Shown below are the embeddings from randomly sampled rollouts from ambiguous initial words like "The" and "A":"

https://xcancel.com/N8Programs/status/2044408755790508113

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But thank god at least we have DeepSeek. They keep releasing good models in spite of being so seriously resource constrained. Punching well above their weight. But they are not just 6 months behind, either.

I’ve worked, for a long time professionally, in the open model space for 3 years and up to 2 months ago I would have agreed with you. But it’s empirically not the case today. These models (combined with a good harness) have dramatically improved in both power and performance.

Gemma 4 was a major improvement is self-hostable local models and Qwen-3.6-A34B is a beast, and runs great on an MBP (and insanely well on a 4090).

The biggest lift is combining these models with a good agent harness (personally prefer Hermes agent). But I’ve found in practice they’re really not benchmaxxing. I’ve had these agents successfully hand a few non-trivial research projects that I wouldn’t have been able to accomplish as successfully even last year.

When you add in the open-but-not local models, Kimi, GLM, Minimax, you have a lot of very nice options. For personal use anything I don’t use local models for I give to my Kimi 2.6 powered agent.

Kimi k2.6 is about on par with GPT 5.2 so I’d say open weight models are about 6 months behind.

The Chinese models should stay close on a lag. They’re doing a ton of distillation that, realistically, I’m not sure the American frontiers can stop.