I'm working on a HiRAM Deals, a rapid discovery and filtering tool for finding competitively priced workstations with 32GB - 2TB of RAM so you can actually get started and run all the local AI workflows you read about every day.
This is the best take. Return on capital is diminishing from intense competition so improvements get hidden away like the gems they are.
1) Frontier labs have no incentive to give the general public their best anymore; it's instantly distilled off of them. Why not charge governments and big corps real money to use the real good stuff instead?
2) So we get distilled-off-frontier public APIs like 5.6 and Fable/Opus. And the open source labs are distilling off of those.
3) There's a lot of benchmark hacking right now among all the publicly available models, actual usability of Opus for coding is far below its benchmarks suggest.
4) But context window, cybersecurity, logical coherence, and tool usage are absolutely better on Fable and Sol. It looks to me their internal tools definitely even better and not plateauing. But we won't get to use it.
You don't really need a maintainer when codex or claude code can set it up for you; thats how I got Trellis2 working on windows and tiny VRAM despite Microsoft recommending you have 24GB VRAM and Linux. Models are pretty disposable now.
So, instead of having one or two maintained projects that work super well, now we have hundreds or thousands of people half-assing it locally each time they need it? Doesn't sound efficient.
you're right, but flipped on its' head it also means that a well-meaning FOSS project may not ship out a zero-day in the future that affects half the planet at once.
now we'll just always be vulnerable from different angles in different and unique ways across the globe.
better? well, no.. but it is different, and biology has offered tons of wisdom about why it's a good thing to achieve things different ways across the world, maybe some far-future version of this weird fragmentation of work that is happening now will contribute to some kind of herd effect that reduces the severity or magnitude of some bug or work of malice.
who knows though, i'm probably just considering it too positively. The disintegration of consolidated effort is a pita, I agree.
There has to be a middle ground between a monoculture and not sharing a single knowledge bit between every human. Because if everyone is making their half assed thing just for themselves using LLM without sharing anything, that also means FOSS will stop existing, and knowledge will only evolve inside the corporations that have money for creating their provate knowledge bases.
It might make sense to do this if there literally isn't an existing solution out there, but I think most would find that it's better to use an existing solution than to recreate the wheel every time there's a need. It's just less effort/time/money.
