The open models catch up, the _US_ open models catch up much more slowly. Different incentives and cultures.

US open weights are much worse, way more than 12 months apart compared to frontier.

> Why does that seem unlikely? The difference between frontier and open weights has been much less than 12 months for a while now.

Frontier and open weights? Yes.

Frontier and _US_ open weights? No.

I'd expect a US open weights provider to suddenly get bought or go non-open if they get near Opus 5.5 anyway.

Thanks for your review, 15 day old HN account that likes praising Mercury services.

I just use it for normal coding stuff.

It's not as good as the current frontier, to be fair. I don't use it to help me think through architecture, for example. But I have found to work well for at least like half of coding tasks once architecture and patterns are in place. Its advantage is that it's very very fast.

MoA schemes that use proposers/task-separation/supervisory roles can still benefit from very fast diffusion models like mercury, the overall speed doesn't have to be bottle-necked by the slowest model -- that depends on the arrangement it's deployed in.

but to your point , yeah diffusion models can be kind of brain dead without proper coaxing.

my ideal arrangement is a smarter/bigger model supervising lots of proposals from diffusion models. The diffusion models spit out a big proposal each, the bigger model can vet something as minor as the headline or filename for each proposal, time still ends up being saved.