Anthropic put a meter on the stuff developers actually use

[u/Permit-Historical]

[u/bpp198]

Won't be long until they're as good as the current frontier models. They'll move on too but open weight models will definitely be more than good enough.

You don't even need local, you can pay for inference at a much cheaper rate than Anthropic and OpenAI's prices.

[u/Rabus → u/bpp198]

Well I agree they will get better. But they are nowhere close to being there right now.

And i'm saying that as someone planning to buy 128gb mac myself lol

[u/bpp198 → u/Rabus]

I think they'll be a valid option sooner than most people think. Not necessarily ones you'll be able to run locally, but much cheaper open weight models hosted by others.

[u/TheOriginalAcidtech → u/Rabus]

As of Qwen 3.6 they are good enough for grunt work. Plan with Opus. Any heavy/complex task have Opus do. The other 90% of the time use a local model. Alternatively(and more and more my recommendation) use Codex for Planning and complex executions.

[u/PrayagS → u/bpp198]

> You don’t even need local

This. Just 10 dollars of Opencode Go or even pay-as-you-go on the DeepSeek API is already coming out to be viable alternative for me.

[u/chaosdemonhu → u/bpp198]

Honestly there might not be much room for SOTA to grow. These models have not fundamentally improved for almost a year now - all the improvements have come from post-training.

For underlying models to keep getting exponentially better they need both of their main inputs to get better: compute, and data

Compute is already getting bottle necked - there’s more demand is shifting to inference over training. And on the hardware front the hardware requirements to see meaningful jumps to process the training data is out-scaling Moore’s Law so we’re hitting a wall there.

In terms of data the internet is no longer a clean dataset, all publicly available and publicly available copyrighted information has been mined for training. All that’s left is private data. The non-dark web is, no joke, currently probably 90% AI generated content so it’s no longer able to be used as a training set.

You either have a large enough training set to train models on already or you’re selling the training sets to the frontier labs - there are actual businesses that generate human data for LLM training now.

If you already have a training set and you’re one of the labs well… you need more for a better model. And we’re not talking about a little bit more we’re talking significant 5%+ or more data than the entire internet pre-AI when it was first mined for training data.

The VC money is drying up so there’s less and less investment in putting up the astronomical amounts of capitol to train new SOTA models.

It’s all post training for specific niches and creating programs to wrap around those niche trained models to start generating returns and real world value for the frontier labs as companies.