alt Hacker NewsOpen models lag the frontier ~3-6 months, though they're likely smaller than frontier models as well so that lag might not be fully real. Qwen 3.6 27B is very usable for average coding, and Gemma4 31b is very usable for day to day tasks.
The problem there isn't the models, it's consumer hardware. Even 16GB cards aren't the norm, and even with massive improvements in per-parameter performance we probably still need 48GB memory to get models that feel smart enough to trust.
“Average” is also doing terrible things there. The “average GPU” is probably the integrated graphics on the CPU of a laptop.
If you scoped it to “average gaming desktop”, double digit VRAM is pretty normal at this point. If costs came down, I imagine the higher end GPUs would start including enough VRAM for 30B-ish models.