They aren't completely absent. Google keeps releasing Gemma models. Nvidia publishes Nemotron. Microsoft has their Phi series. IBM publishes Granite. Even OpenAI released a new open model (gpt-oss) less than a year ago.

https://deepmind.google/models/gemma/gemma-4/

https://developer.nvidia.com/ai-models#:~:text=NVIDIA%20Nemo...

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/phi-4-reasonin...

https://www.ibm.com/granite

https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-oss/

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giancarlostoro 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I was going to link all of these, some are better than others, but they're all reasonably capable. A lot of these have versions that can run on modest hardware too. Granite was the most surprising I learned about recently, wasn't too good with Zed though.

	▲	philipkglass 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I think that models like Granite are less known because they aren't clear leaders in any particular area. This obscurity is also another sign of how fast models are developing. If current Granite models had been released 4 years ago, they would have been astonishing breakthroughs at the time.