Given your knowledge on this - do you think we'll see an open source model with Opus levels of capability? IMO if/when this happens - I would 100% stop using Anthropic.
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 :)
It's personal, but I prefer CapEx over OpEx for this. If you can purchase a device upfront that runs a decent local LLM, you get the peace of mind that your setup won't suddenly change over time and can only get better.
Now, there's a bit of a degree to which some of the open source models do some benchmaxxing, and bigger models with more params may always feel like they have more depth. But anyhow, right now you have something that is arguably comparable to Claude 4 Opus on your laptop. I can't really compare myself because I never used it. It looks like Claude 4 Opus is still available on OpenRouter, so you could try it out and compare yourself if you're interested.
It will likely always be the case that there are proprietary cloud models that are more powerful than what you can run on a laptop. You can just do a whole lot more with terabytes of VRAM on multi-GPU clusters than you can do on a laptop. So for folks who must have the most capable, you're probably not going to want to leave Anthropic.
But right now, the models you can run on your laptop are comparable to the cloud models that were popular when vibecoding and Claude Code first took off.
Anyhow, feel free to try them out head to head on OpenRouter. I'd love to see someone write up their results, of a modern local sized open source model vs. frontier models from ~a year ago, on something other than the standard benchmarks.
Will this trend continue? Who knows. Both the frontier and local model will probably continue to get better. Which one will hit the top of the S-curve first? Hard to say, really. But what you can do right now locally is better than what you could do a year ago on the frontier, and lots of people were already using it pretty heavily a year ago.
Hoever, November is when most folks agree that the frontier models got good enough for much of their work. Local models aren't quite there yet (where by "local" I mean "can run at reasonable speed and quant on a system less that $10,000 with today's RAM and GPU prices"). The biggest open weights models are getting there, but those require something like an 8x H100 server to reasonably run.
It's likely that there will always be a gap between frontier and local if you're comparing models at the same time, you can just do a lot more with terabytes of HBM than gigabytes of DDR. But will local models get good enough to be usable for useful work? For many folks, they already are.
For web development (or anything else with an extreme amount of training data) it's number one for sure. You can't beat it at its costs. US companies will not be able to compete on a competitive market, which is why they rely on so much US government protection + corporate welfare.
I'm not affiliated, I just like his style and have found it handy. I know it's not very rigorous, but it's good enough for me and I've found his examples to pretty closely match the results I see in real life.
Claude 4 Opus: https://youtu.be/J7omabtqnBM?t=193
Qwen 3.6 35B A3B: https://youtu.be/gVU-DQeqkI0?t=215
Qwen 3.6 produced far more working functionality than Claude 4 Opus did.
Obviously, just one test of a single one-shot prompt of a silly toy OS, but yeah, this particular test shows Qwen 3.6 running locally dramatically outperforming Claude 4 Opus, which was a frontier model a year ago.
But it is still available on Google Vertex according to OpenRouter (though it's possible that info is just out of date, it's currently quoting 3tps which is unusably slow): https://openrouter.ai/anthropic/claude-opus-4
OpenAI was offering 2x usage at one point and I still used opus just because it's so much more effective.
Anthropic has been releasing models named Opus since 2024 with Claude 3 Opus.
Opus has gotten vastly more capable since then.
Local model far surpass Opus 3. They even surpass Opus 4 on most benchmarks.
Sure, if you compare to the latest Opus 4.8 or even 4.6, they're not there yet. But there's a huge difference in performance between 4 and 4.8.
When I colloquially say Opus level I really mean Opus 4.5 or later
More and more specialized and ultra-performant chips are going to flood the consumer market. Especially once new hardware foundries will start producing (well if we don't die from WW3 in the interval).
In 10 years from now, when even basic computers will have 128 GB of memory, and phones will have super optimized tuned models, then what will be the point of Anthropic ?
Just use Gemma/Gemini/Siri or whatever.
Pornography and uncensored models is also pushing toward local models.
It's not like needs of people grows exponentially, the needs follow an asymptote instead (they are capped).
The real revolution is offline robots and self-driving cars, but LLMs are already quite maxed.
For programmers, now, what Anthropic offers is like 3% improvement on a known test (like this pelican riding a bicycle), or on questions leaked from benchmark insiders.
It's ok but not like revolutionary (Fable was better but it was unusable, easy 20 minutes per one prompt due to overthinking).