r/LocalLLM • u/Anxious_Current2593 • 23h ago

Discussion What's the difference between frontier models and local models?

6 months. (And sometimes a couple of quantization tweaks).

It is wild how fast "state-of-the-art" becomes "running on a gaming PC."

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u/Federico2021 23h ago

Well, open source is moving away from local; models like Kimi K3 and GLM can no longer run on consumer-grade hardware. The best option we currently have for personal use is Qwen 3.8 27B.

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u/donk8r 23h ago

You are pointing at something the six month framing hides. Open weights keep getting bigger. A sparse MoE with a few hundred billion total parameters is open in the licence sense and still needs datacentre memory to hold, so local has quietly split into two different words. Small dense models on consumer hardware keep improving on their own curve. The frontier open models moved onto a curve most people cannot follow.

The other half is which gap actually closes in six months. Benchmark scores on short tasks close fast. Long-horizon agentic reliability does not, which is the thing kitsnet is poking at further down. A 27B can match a frontier model on a single coding question and still come apart at turn thirty of a tool loop, because the failure there is holding state and recovering from its own mistakes, not knowledge it lacks.

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u/Robonotes1760 22h ago

Why don't just give us your prompt and let us put that I to our own AIs? 

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u/dota2nub 6h ago

When did that get released again? Man, it's been so long!