No doubt the open ecosystem is making huge strides, and the gap between open models and the commercial frontier keeps narrowing. What's an Opus 4.8 today will likely be a large open model in a few months — and in a year or two we might have consumer-hardware models matching today's frontier capability. Just look at the recent Qwen and Gemma releases. It's worth saying the frontier closed labs are charting the path, and the labs releasing open weights are following close behind at a fraction of the cost (though 500B–1T models, open or not, aren't exactly within everyone's reach).

A future where capable AI is genuinely accessible to everyone doesn't look far off — especially since at this point a lot of the robustness and usefulness comes down to the application layer wrapping the model, not just the model itself.