I would expect open weights models to always lag behind; training is resource-intensive and it’s much easier to finance if you can make money directly from the result. So in a year we may have a ~700B open weights model that competes with Gemini 3, but by then we’ll have Gemini 4, and other things we can’t predict now.
There will be diminishing returns though as the future models won't be thah much better we will reach a point where the open source model will be good enough for most things. And the need for being on the latest model no longer so important.
For me the bigger concern which I have mentioned on other AI related topics is that AI is eating all the production of computer hardware so we should be worrying about hardware prices getting out of hand and making it harder for general public to run open source models. Hence I am rooting for China to reach parity on node size and crash the PC hardware prices.
I had a similar opinion, that we were somewhere near the top of the sigmoid curve of model improvement that we could achieve in the near term. But given continued advancements, I’m less sure that prediction holds.
Yeah I have a similar opinion and you can go back almost a year when claude 3.5 launched and I said on hackernews, that its good enough
And now I am saying the same for gemini 3 flash.
I still feel the same way tho, sure there is an increase but I somewhat believe that gemini 3 is good enough and the returns on training from now on might not be worth thaat much imo but I am not sure too and i can be wrong, I usually am.
My model is a bit simpler: model quality is something like the logarithm of effort you put into making the model. (Assuming you know what you are doing with your effort.)
So I don't think we are on any sigmoid curve or so. Though if you plot the performance of the best model available at any point in time against time on the x-axis, you might see a sigmoid curve, but that's a combination of the logarithm and the amount of effort people are willing to spend on making new models.
(I'm not sure about it specifically being the logarithm. Just any curve that has rapidly diminishing marginal returns that nevertheless never go to zero, ie the curve never saturates.)
If Gemini 3 flash is really confirmed close to Opus 4.5 at coding and a similarly capable model is open weights, I want to buy a box with an usb cable that has that thing loaded, because today that’s enough to run out of engineering work for a small team.
Open weights doesn't mean you can necessarily run it on a (small) box.
If Google released their weights today, it would technically be open weight; but I doubt you'd have an easy time running the whole Gemini system outside of Google's datacentres.
