alt Hacker NewsThat's a lame attitude. There are local models that are last year's SOTA, but that's not good enough because this year's SOTA is even better yet still...
I've said it before and I'll say it again, local models are "there" in terms of true productive usage for complex coding tasks. Like, for real, there.
The issue right now is that buying the compute to run the top end local models is absurdly unaffordable. Both in general but also because you're outbidding LLM companies for limited hardware resources.
You have a $10K budget, you can legit run last year's SOTA agentic models locally and do hard things well. But most people don't or won't, nor does it make cost effective sense Vs. currently subsidized API costs.
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First, making sure to offer an upvote here. I happen to be VERY enthusiastic about local models, but I've found them to be incredibly hard to host, incredibly hard to harness, and, despite everything, remarkably powerful if you are willing to suffer really poor token/second performance...
> that are last year's SOTA
Early last year or late last year?
opus 4.5 was quite a leap
I completely see your point, but when my / developer time is worth what it is compared to the cost of a frontier model subscription, I'm wary of choosing anything but the best model I can. I would love to be able to say I have X technique for compensating for the model shortfall, but my experience so far has been that bigger, later models out perform older, smaller ones. I genuinely hope this changes through. I understand the investment that it has taken to get us to this point, but intelligence doesn't seem like it's something that should be gated.