I think the hype around Qwen and even Gemma4 often floated for views/attention glosses over that these models have clear gaps behind what closed models offer.

In short, it has its uses but it would/should not be the main driver. Will it get better, I'm sure of it, but there is too much hype and exaggeration over open source models, for one the hardware simply isn't enough at a price point where we can run something that can seriously compete with today's closed models.

If we got something like GPT-5.4-xhigh that can run on some local hardware under 5k, that would be a major milestone.

Quantization can introduce these issues, and Gemma 4 also had issues because the prompt tokens that Gemma used was new and not well supported yet.