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. and the frustrating part is it's not a fixed target. every time open models close in, frontier moves. what i can't work out is whether that's sustainable long term. at some point the architecture matures and the gap collapses for good. or maybe compute access keeps the ceiling moving indefinitely.…