Interestingly, I've found the output of Qwen 3.8 27B to be competitive with Opus (4.6-ish anyway, not quite 4.8), but the experience is very different.

Where Opus has seen it before and knows how to do it, Qwen knows how to work it out. It turns out it's surprisingly capable at working things out. The obvious drawback is that it takes tokens and time.

All the same, getting to run something this capable locally is momentous, and suggests to me that streaming tokens from colossal data centers might not be the long term path forward.