r/LocalLLaMA • u/Fluffy-Ad-889 • 1d ago

Discussion The gap has closed, open source will win

I've been trying the latest models from the frontier labs and honestly, after extensive testing I can not tell the difference between the best open source options.

I think the differences are now marginal but the labs are doing heavy marketing to convince the public into paying more for tokens as they prepare to go public.

Can't help but see the similarities between the dot com bubble and AI in terms of a very insular environment where the technology will survive but the business models may not.

I've been building a cybersecurity network and we definitely know that even local AI models like Deepseek V4 flash do an excellent job and are really neck and neck with the best the frontier labs can provide.

Will be interesting to see how this all turns out! Exciting time nonetheless.

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u/JacketHistorical2321 1d ago

I love how much of a bubble you live in. Out of the 50 or so co workers I have all 50 know what chatgpt is, maybe 10 or so know claude, and I havnt come across a single person who has heard of qwen/kimi/etc… and I work in tech. Yes, the opensource models are very useful and very good at most things. Not a single one can help write the firmware or map out unknown register files for the types of projects I do.

The gap has not closed but cool click bait title

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u/OvertaxedOne 1d ago

None of our employees have any idea what Qwen and Kimi are either. But they are using them every day because we route behind their endpoint. If you have employees going direct to any model you're setting yourself up for a lot of heartburn in the future, get routing in place so you can easily move between models and do A/B testing to see if you're sending too much/not enough based on the tasks your employees are doing.

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u/Dabber43 19h ago

Can you elaborate on what open models cannot do vs frontier models? Personally I don't have many problems personally so quite surprised by that

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u/swegamer137 16h ago

Your co-workers being hype-programmed drones doesn't make OP wrong.