We use Azure Foundry hosted Opus and it seems as capable as ever.

I run a small local GPU cluster for Qwen 3.8 Flash and while it's "free" (you should check electricity prices in EU...) unfortunately it doesn't even compare to Opus 5.5 or Astra in capabilities. It's like GPT 6 vs GPT ~4, but imagine GPT 4 is also 100x slower and sounds like an airplane taking off.

In the end it's totally possible that I would pay more for electricity running Qwen for 24 hours churning on some complex problem vs. Astra one-shotting it in 15 minutes.

I hope we get there, but it's not there yet, and I'm sure never will be with consumer GPUs. Maybe if you spend $20k+ on a local AI rig. There's just no market force to give access to AI to everyone at fair price.