There is nothing open-weight that even comes close IMO. The only half-decent model that 99% of people can actually dream of running locally is Qwen 3.8 27B.

It's odd, a year ago the models then were a great daily driver, and a year before that too.

Going back to the model that was great for our daily work a year ago now seems like a step backwards. Clearly it can't be good enough?

But our work hasn't changed. What's happened is our expectations have changed with each model release.

I think the key part is not to depend on their harness where it operates in proprietary ways. At bare minimum, if you can plugin an OpenAI model or even X or Google model that operates close to the same level, you will have a fallback, even if it isn't an open one itself.

Yes, open models are needed too - the oligopoly is not much less dangerous than the monopoly for some scenarios. But at least if your tool set can switch to those it can probably switch to an open model if it really comes to that.

There isnt one.

The best option we have current is likely Qwen 3.8 Flash Next. Which is about equivalent to Opus 4.6

however Qwen4 was announced to be released next week. Which people think will let LocalAI jump to just above Opus4.8

Also of note, there isnt really a harness as good as claude yet either. The harness is also a very important piece to the puzzel, and those also fall behind frontier capability too.

As of today, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 or Kimi K3.

If you are bound to consumer-obtainable hardware, Qwen3.8-Flash-Next. If you are bound to consumer-accessible hardware, Qwen3.8-27b today and Qwen4-27b when it releases next week (Qwen models consistently punch far above their parameter size).

Local is out of reach for most folks, as hardware prices have gone through the roof.