alt Hacker NewsNo mention of open weights anywhere in the piece, which is weird. Qwen, Llama, DeepSeek are months behind frontier, not years. If you're a European startup worried about getting cut off from Anthropic's API in 2027, the real question is what the open-weight frontier looks like then. Probably pretty capable. That undercuts most of the doom scenario.
Also, he concedes Mythos-level capabilities will be cheap next year, then handwaves it with "you need the best AI, not good-enough AI." For most use cases, frontier minus six months is fine.
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Affordability of hardware that can run local LLMs is a real factor, too. Not sure when RAM prices are going down, but with everything that’s happening and can happen in the world right now, it doesn’t look like it’ll drop in the near or medium-term
Open weights will remain open only if they’re significantly worse than the frontier weights.
Before you challenge with benchmarks, consider the labs which release open weight models have internal testing and unpublished results.
There are two problems with that scenario:
1. Your European startup will be competing with others using a much better frontier model. In a scenario where you already have other major disadvantages (access to capital, labor), you might be outcompeted
2. Open models have been keeping pace very nicely, but they rely on distillation of frontier models. If the race gets really tight, this could be affected so that the time gap grows larger (ie, it's very unlikely anyone but Anthropic is distilling from Mythos at the moment)
Someone recently made a graph showing that the gap between US American frontier LLMs and Chinese open weight LLMs (including DeepSeek v4) is widening. Unfortunately I can't find it anymore.
Update: GPT-5.5 found it.
Article: https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2026/05/caisi-evaluati...
Graph: https://www.nist.gov/sites/default/files/images/2026/05/01/1...
Llama is not months behind GPT 5.5 Pro. I don't think Qwen or DeepSeek are either.
edit: I'm specifically referring to the "5.5 Pro" model, not regular 5.5 with Pro tier subscription. Claude has no model available that's comparable to 5.5 Pro either.
Open models are pretty good at this point but the problem is that they are limited by the tooling and infrastructure that surrounds them. For example, the last time I tried to set up web search with an open model, the experience was pretty bad.
Open weights undercut the absolute cutoff scenario. They don't fully solve the question of who gets the best model first, who gets enough tokens to use it heavily, and who gets to integrate it into sensitive workflows without waiting for permission