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Well, it depends on the hardware you have. If you have a hardware locally that can run best open models, then your local models are as capable as the open models.

That said, open models are not far behind SOTA, less than 9 months gap.

If what you're asking about those models that you can run on retail GPUs, then they're a couple years behind. They're "hobby" grade.

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Thanks, yes, I meant even ordinary retail PCs, not specialized GPUs. At some point in time in history, SOTA closed models were at a level that compares to todays open models that can run on ordinary hardware.

Retail PCs will probably never catch up to even the open‑weight models (the full, non‑quantized versions). Unless there’s a breakthrough, they just don’t have enough parameters to hold all the information we expect SOTA models to contain.

That’s the conventional view. I think there’s another angle: train a local model to act as an information agent. It could “realize” that, yeah, it’s a small model with limited knowledge, but it knows how to fetch the right data. Then you hook it up to a database and let it do the heavy lifting.

Maybe the industry adapts too and the future PC is AI-ready out-of-the-box. Because people demand that.

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