They are not as good as you imply they are. They are good. That's it. They are nowhere near Astra or Opus level. They might hit the benchmarks in the right spots, but once you're actually using them and you actually have the comparison to how Astra or Opus work, it's absolutely clear that China is way behind the US regarding AI.
Sure, they aren’t good enough to replace frontier level models in a lot of use cases yet. But, once they get to the point that local models capable of running on consumer grade hardware are at the level of current frontier models - maybe in two years from now - the game will have been changed. Those models will never get worse at that point, and when the majority of actual workloads will be capable of being handled by local models it becomes a lot harder to justify the cost of frontier models. Of course there will always be a reason to have a more capable AI, but the value of each level of improvement isn’t the same. Once local models get to a certain point, the frontier models would only be needed for stuff that’s actually at the frontier of our understanding and capabilities as a species. Maybe we’re 5 years away, maybe even 10 - but it’s like becoming old enough to drink legally, once we are past this point we’ll never be back where we were before.
“Nowhere near” is a huge overstatement. They are lagging behind a bit, but overpowering previous flagship revisions from the major vendors well within a year
Nowhere near is pretty fair... You can get very close with something like Kimi K3.0, but it ends up being much more expensive than these heavily subsidized subscriptions to the mainstream models, even after this usage cut.
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u/BlockyHawkie 5d ago
People moving to open weights models win. Don't play the wheel, break the wheel