[hasperdi]

Well, it depends on the hardware you have. If you have a hardware locally that can run best open models, then your local models are as capable as the open models.

That said, open models are not far behind SOTA, less than 9 months gap.

If what you're asking about those models that you can run on retail GPUs, then they're a couple years behind. They're "hobby" grade.

[myk-e]

Thanks, yes, I meant even ordinary retail PCs, not specialized GPUs. At some point in time in history, SOTA closed models were at a level that compares to todays open models that can run on ordinary hardware.

[hasperdi]

Retail PCs will probably never catch up to even the open‑weight models (the full, non‑quantized versions). Unless there’s a breakthrough, they just don’t have enough parameters to hold all the information we expect SOTA models to contain.

That’s the conventional view. I think there’s another angle: train a local model to act as an information agent. It could “realize” that, yeah, it’s a small model with limited knowledge, but it knows how to fetch the right data. Then you hook it up to a database and let it do the heavy lifting.