Their gap over Chinese models like GLM-5.1 is nowhere near 18 months. In many areas, it’s less than 6 months. The best closed models 18 months ago were worse than Qwen3.6.

These coding agent models only started getting useful in January. Before that they were difficult to control autocomplete, and not very smart.

January was an inflection point, and no open weights model has crossed over that same threshold.

This is definitely recursive self improvement territory, except that we're prohibited from participating.

It feels like the capability gap is wider than before.

It was more like November. But it wasn’t really an inflection point, harnesses got good enough that people started noticing by the holiday break. And I’m not discounting some good ol’ stealth marketing in there as well.

Deepseek feels pretty close to Opus at this point, and it’s certainly useful enough for me to spend $20 on api tokens instead of four Claude max plans….

Have you tried deepseek V4? It costs pennies and is as good as Opus 4.6 (I found 4.7 to be a downgrade, and cancelled my claude subscription before 4.8).

The threshold has definitely been crossed.

It is not as good as Opus. I've tried to write Rust with it (and Codex for that matter), and it's awful.