Their gap over Chinese models like GLM-5.1 is nowhere near 18 months. In many areas, it’s less than 6 months. The best closed models 18 months ago were worse than Qwen3.6.

These coding agent models only started getting useful in January. Before that they were difficult to control autocomplete, and not very smart.

January was an inflection point, and no open weights model has crossed over that same threshold.

This is definitely recursive self improvement territory, except that we're prohibited from participating.

It feels like the capability gap is wider than before.