alt Hacker NewsWhenever we get the locally runnable 4k models things are going to get really awkward for the big 3 labs. Well at least Google will still have their ad revenue I guess.
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They're not perfect but the local model game is progressing so quickly that they're impossible to ignore. I've only played around with the new qwen 3.6 models for a few minutes (it's damn impressive) but this weekend's project is to really put it through its paces.
If I can get the performance I'm seeing out of free models on a 6-year-old Macbook Pro M1, it's a sign of things to come.
Frontier models will have their place for 1) extensive integrations and tooling and 2) massive context windows. But I could see a very real local-first near future where a good portion of compute and inference is run locally and only goes to a frontier model as needed.
If the apple silicon keeps making the gains it makes, a mac studio with 128gb of ram + local models will be a practical all-local workflow by say 2028 or 2030. OpenAI and Anthropic are going to have to offer something really incredible if they want to keep subscription revenue from software developers in the near future, imo
Given how little claude usage they've been giving us on the "pro" plan lately, I've started doing more with the various open Qwen3.* models. Both Qwen3-coder-next and Qwen3.5-27b have been giving me good results and their 3.6 models are starting to be released. I think Anthropic may be shooting themselves in the foot here as more people start moving to local models due to costs and/or availability. Are the Qwen models as good as Claude right now? No. But they're getting close to as good as Claude sonnet was 9 months to a year ago (prior to 4.5, around 4.0). If I need some complex planning I save that for claude and have the Qwen models do the implementation.