> Open weight US based Opus 5.5 within 12 months.

Seems unlikely. Maybe open weight at all near there? That'd be great.

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

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

Frontier and open weights? Yes. Frontier and _US_ open weights? No.

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

People say this about the frontier every time, and the open models catch up in a matter of months every time.

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

Inception Mercury 3 and Particle-1's model are also good.

(I am assuming Inception is an American company, not sure TBH)

Agree, Mercury 3 is one of my favorite models right now...the speed is such a quality of life improvement.

Really? I'm surprised. What do you use it for?

My read on Diffusion LLMs has been that it's cool tech, but only useful for things like like code autocomplete or editing a block of text.

They don't beat autoregressive models on quality per compute, assuming you are serving lots of users and can batch requests.

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.

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.

Sorry to put it bluntly, but, Mercury is sh*t in comparison. And I have genuinely tried a few times to use it since the speed is so good. But nop.. it just isn't there.

For my own purposes, I found Mercury Decide to be excellent. Better than Jev at what I threw at it. Inception did a really great job with it.

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

I'm not affiliated with them at all. yeah I like them, and yeah I like to compare decision models at the moment.

Don't believe me? Google my name.

May I add Poolside (Laguna S) to this? Used them extensively during their free trial (sadly now apparently over).-

[delayed]

Could you give some examples what makes them good, thanks

I give it 2.

That’d be the inflection point I’m waiting for!

Things have been remarkably "not terrible" since approximately the release of Laguna S 2.1 a while back in early summer 2026, which is now outdated within the past 6 month time frame by other, better non CN open weight models.

I'm not saying that any of them are to the level as a deepseek v4.1 flash 1017 or similar but they're catching up. The most recent huge mistral release is also grounds for an optimistic view.