Opus 4.6 was a 2025 model and many people (myself included) feel that if that's where models peaked, we won't be disappointed.

Even at 2-bit quantization, DS4 is probably on par with a 2024 frontier model. You can run that today on local hardware, and at a minimum, local models are going to keep pace over the next 12-24 months. Even if they don't close the gap with frontier models, they'll still play an important role in the overall pipeline for cost, speed and privacy reasons.

That's without even mentioning the additional capability that something like a Taalas chip churning out 17k tokens/sec could unlock.