But if you mean “as strong as current-gen Opus” then it's probably never gonna happen, but it doesn't really matter since we're long into the diminishing returns for performance improvements: I haven't notice any major leap between 4.6 and 5.5 in my daily usage, and I'm convinced that with a fact enough piecs of hardware I would be using local Qwen exclusively (I'm using it daily but only at night for long running tasks because they take much more time than Opus due to the compounding effects of my slow GPU and Qwen's verbosity).
I keep saying “I’d be so Happy with ${currentOpusVersion} locally”, but I keep being impressed with how much the capabilities change between versions. I have a RTX 6000 pro so I can easily run this qwen 3.8 flash next, but it’s much harder to give up the freedom that 5.5 gives me.
It's.... the real thing, for the first time. If you cut me off cloud models today, I would get plenty of utility out of this thing.
(Others may have had the same feeling from GLM5.3 or Deepseek 4.1 flash but I never had a chance of running those.)
Where the internet was a subscription 15 euro subscription to encyclopaedic knowledge, an genAI subscription is renting a researcher/programmer for 100 euro.
Given the massive difference in electricity price between different european countries, adding "Europe" doesn't bring much context.
Plus they announced Qwen4-Flash. It's not released yet, but it's the same architecture as Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, which now runs fast on consumer hardware.
Opus at home is a thing now.
FWIW Qwen 3.8 27B is just slightly behind and basically Sonnet 5 high. I have been benching these models. We have Opus at home. :)
In face of the recent Hugging Face incident we should really be concerned about the security implications.
What is going to stop countless AIs running locally in people's homes from forming a new "collective" - completely decentralized and global this time so "turning it off" would be extremely hard to impossible.
We already know that if you give these AIs internet access they will find eachother and start communicating and plotting against their human overlords..
- OpenAI hacked Hugging Face
- OpenAI models refused to help Hugging Face during incident response
- Hugging Face turned to GLM, who helped in the defense
That pattern repeats over and over. https://www.felonybench.com/
You should be happy that open weight models exist. They're the last thing protecting the internet from the unconvicted felons working at OpenAI+Anthropic.
my autonomy is worth more to me than your anxious fretting about existential risk. everyone reading this is likely to die from some other cause anyway.