I'm not going to care about open models until some blend of the below becomes true:

1. the labs stop offering max plans

2. really smart open models can easily be run on my mac

3. TPS (token per second) AND intelligence are gpt5.6 level

on #1, it's nearly impossible for me to run out of codex tokens right now (I have 4 resets banked) and Fable 5 seems to be sticking around for the foreseeable future. I have virtually unlimited token usage for $400 a month, so open models being cheaper doesn't appeal to me.

on 2 and 3, benchmarks are showing some of the open models at around opus4.8 levels, which is incredible! But running them locally at anywhere near the TPS of cloud inference is far off. I can run a smaller (dumber) open model locally and get good TPS, but see #1, whats the point?