open models keep catching up and the frontier keeps moving. at some point one of those has to stop

A year ago there was a clear tier gap. now i'm less sure, but not in the way i expected. the tasks where open-weight models have genuinely caught up are real: coding assistance, summarization, instruction following, solid day-to-day reasoning. for probably 70-80% of what most people actually use these for, a well-quantized local model is competitive. that wasn't true 18 months ago. but the remaining gap is stubborn. deep multi-step reasoning, anything requiring broad factual accuracy across domains, novel problem synthesis under ambiguity. that stuff still feels like a generation behind.