Not this. Let's reframe the problem. How many years behind do you think they are? By all accounts Gemma 4 is better than a frontier model from 3 years ago. Back then we were wowed by frontier models but when the local model reaches the same performance it's no good anymore, because you moved the target?

Relatively speaking local models might always be behind the curve compared to frontier ones. You can tell by the hardware needed to run each. But in absolute terms they're already past the performance threshold everyone praised in the past.

Right now in a lab somewhere there's a model that's probably better than anything else. There's a ChatGPT 5.6, an Opus 4.8. Knowing that do you suddenly feel a wave of disappointment at the current frontier models?