> When China too stops publishing weights you'll never have anything better than K3 / the current SOTA.

Hasn't happened yet. Might not happen at all. Also, there's a lot that can be done with K3.

> Even now open weights are perpetually 6-12 months behind.

This is a very commonplace opinion yet I don't believe it's genuinely true. K3 is hardly much worse than Fable and can surpass it on certain tasks; they read as different, not as one that's 12 months behind the other. And don't forget that access to Fable is highly constrained.

As for small/local models: The leading edge is open by definition, and hardly much worse -- if worse at all -- than small models like Luna or Haiku (lol).