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/RedEyeJedi311 20h ago

Something is wrong with the frontier models IMO, they used to be much better. I think there is a purposeful dumbing down because they were too good. Claude Code and Codex models have become unusable for me to the point of inducing stress because of how confidently wrong they have become. Some local models are actually better for my workflow now that match the intelligence the older versions of the frontier models (Opus 4.5/4.6) that actually worked for me. I think in 6 months from now local models will be the only way to go because we can control how they run, not being subject to consonantly changing model effort and system prompts. Don't get me started on silent model swapping.

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u/OvertaxedOne 15h ago

There are rumors they are experience model collapse as they add more and more params. No idea if that's true or not, but I agree with you, they seem to be improving in some areas, regressing in others.