alt Hacker Newsopen weights is a way to nerf your opponent and is meaningless to your business if you need to retrain a model because your trailing
So, it makes a lot of sense to get people a "demo" and claim the paid product is better.
i think a lot of people have no idea how capable local models are atm.
Two years ago a lot of people thought GPT-4o was usable for software development. I didn’t really find that to be the case in general but certainly it could do a lot of useful things. And now Qwen3.5-8B is just as capable and runs fine on an M2 MacBook Air.