alt Hacker News> Open Source isn't even within 50% of what the SOTA models are.
When was the last time you used any of them? Because, a lot of people are actively using them for 9-5 work today, I count myself in that group. That opinion feels outdated, like it was formed a year ago+ and held onto. Or based on highly quantized versions and or small non-Thinking models.
Do you really think Qwen3.6 for a specific example is "50%" as good as Opus4.7? Opus4.7 is clearly and objectively better, no debate on that, but the gap isn't anywhere near that wide. I'd call "20%" hyperbole, the true difference is difficult to exactly measure but sub-10% for their top-tier Thinking models is likely.
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Qwen3.6 at which model size and quantization? I already think Opus 4.6 is usable but still dumb as bricks. A 20% cut off that feels like it would still be unusable. And that's not even getting to the annoyance of setting everything up to run locally & getting HW that can run it locally which basically looks like a Macbook M4 these days as the x86 side is ridiculously pricey to get decent performance out of models.
Their opinion is also behind on LibreOffice, too. I won't defend GIMP's monstrosity, but I finished a whole dissertation, do all my regular spreadsheet work (that isn't done via R), and have created plenty of visual mockups with LibreOffice. Plus, I don't have to deal with a spammy Windows environment.
Sure, we use Google Drive, too, but that's just for sharing documents across offices, not for everyday use. For that, the open source model is a clear winner in my book.