Every time I check in on this I hear a more recent model is the one where they started doing good work. I'm excited to here that Astra is where it got capable enough to work on code next year

I do think there are now open weight models that are on par with (or beating) Opus 4.5 by now (e.g. Kimi K3, GLM5.3). But yeah obviously the frontier closed source models seem to have pulled away once again, so open weight seems to be a few months behind right now (which might be too long to wait for a lot of people!).

You're not corporate America (and trust me, I mostly mean that as a plus).

I also work in software, and while I vaguely disagree that open models can't be used (they absolutely fit into productive niches here, and holy hell are the last generation [ex laguna s1, kimi k3, glm 5.3, etc] actually decent) - I will agree that SOTA are a better fit for software development, especially when used in conjunction with an already very expensive employee who's driving them.

But for "Corporate America"... no. You absolutely don't need SOTA. They're doing things like transcription, summarization, customer interaction, minor technical tasks like form creation in existing tools, report generation (ex - powerpoint, pdf, docs, etc) and other general "white collar tasks". Think about roles in business that are in the 60-85k compensation range.

It's mostly busy work that keeps existing processes flowing and the business on the rails. Important, but not research/novel.

And cheap ai... is a wonderful fit for a lot of this. No one wants to replace an employee making 80k with a less reliable AI that costs 45k a year in tokens (SOTA). But they're absolutely willing to drop 2-3k/year on AI (~100/month - right in the open model cost range) for that employee if they can get a 10% bump in productivity or happiness.

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