Let me put it like this. I started with local LLMs when ChatGPT still used GPT-3.5. I was amazed how my MacBook with 8GB RAM could run openhermes2.5-mistral: a 7b parameter model that could generate short stories that sort of made sense. Incredible!

Two years later, and I'm running Qwen3.6 35b agentically to develop the start of a repository and automatically run tests to then improve on itself. I never thought we'd get here so quickly with LLMs back then.

I'm pretty sure in two years we'll have current Opus-like quality in the 30-100b parameter model range. But at that point, Opus 6.3 will reason along for us so much better still, that we'll still look at those models in awe. It's great to look ahead, but let's not forget to appreciate how effective the current local models already are :)

Haha well I ask because I don't really want/need anything beyond Opus most of the time. And I'm paranoid that Anthropic is going to be forced to charge the true cost of all this before too long.