Do we really care about this gap? If open models are 6 months to a year behind frontier models, does it really matter that much?
I’ve seen analyses pointing to the fact that the gap is growing, which would be worrying. I think all the benchmarking and whatnot is not reliable so who knows, but we’ll definitely have a good feel in a couple of years.
It depends on how far your own development tasks are beneath the higher levels of complexity and sophistication. The trade-offs for most ordinary developers will be minimal or nothing.
This is the first time in terms of model progress where my personal response is: It does not matter to me because the models 6-12 months ago were already good enough for most everything I need to do. I think 95% of dev work is perfectly fine 6 months behind, if that is truly where we are at now with these open models.