Opinion: locally runnable models now trail the frontier by 1.5-2 years, not 9 months
scaling01 · x · 2026-08-19
Following debate over whether Qwen3.8 27B matches Opus 4.5, the author argues this braindead debate recurs yearly whenever a benchmaxxed small model appears. Their takeaway: the lag from frontier model to a locally runnable equivalent has stretched from 9 months to 1.5-2 years. They'd still pick o3 or Claude Opus over the small model for most tasks.
Related event: Debate: Local Models Trail Frontier by 1.5-2 Years, Not Months(2 posts)→
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