Are there any free models as good as the commercial ones we can run on our own hardware?
Im running Qwen 3.8 Flash Next with an abliteration LoRA, its pretty good. I only really use claude sonnet outside of it, and it is on par
K3 and GLM 5.3 flash are pretty mid by comparison when you consider how much more it will take to run them
No, technically speaking, because you are constrained by hardware. But there are many that definitely aren't as good yet still usable for many tasks, such as Qwen 3.8 27 B (and soon the Qwen 4 series too), Gemma for writing and roleplaying, etc.