Ask HN: Open Models are 9 months behind SOTA, how far behind are Local Models?

Post by myk-e » Mon, Feb 09, 2026, 9:48 PM UTC

hasperdi wrote: post #8

myk-e wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 knowl…

Post by myk-e » Tue, Feb 10, 2026, 2:18 PM UTC

segmondy wrote: post #12

Local models are not behind. There are many specialized local models on huggingface that can do things that none of the closed/commercial models can do. The only way to get that edge is to run locally. When I say many, I mean in the thousands.