Superior? Sure. But do people need the capabilities beyond what can be reasonably achieved with local models? I think the people that actually sit in that gap are vanishingly small, and if your title contains "Engineer" or "Developer" or something like that, you are not one of those people (at least for doing your job)

As for faster, maybe? It depends on the metrics and what you're doing with it. If you mean TPS, no, I get much higher TPS and even faster TTFT on my local setup than frontier models. If you mean time to complete tasks... maybe. If you're throwing whole projects at it to vibecode, yeah, a frontier model will dump slop so fast it'll make your head spin. If you're doing actual methodical development, like doing spec-driven development and actually reading the specs before spinning off agents to implement them, rather than just having another agent review it and yolo, you'll find that frontier models don't really push the needle that much, and you'll be making high-quality projects.

Every hour baby-sitting a local model can be extremely expensive in billable hours.

Is there a model that doesn't need babysitting? Half my day is spent untangling BS that Claude and Codex hallucinate. Particularly around hallucinated product requirements. Its still faster than hand-writing code but only just. I'm seriously considering just going back to the early copilot days where I lead coding and just let it try to auto-correct. That was a great balance of AI enhancing my speed and workflows without removing any confidence in what was being shipped.

give your models a more organized context/harness if they are hallucinating product requirements... and I'm not talking about some hulking context framework. just organize your documentation in a canonical way. This product requirements hallucination is something that would bite me constantly if...they ever actually hallucinated them (and they don't, ever). This is most certainly user error.

You're untangling hallucinated BS from Opus 5.5/Fable?

We are literally in this thread because so-called frontier SOTA Claude models are shitting the bed and require babysitting. So this argument is essentially moot.

What’s your local setup? I’d love to give it a spin; lack of 5 hours limits is much needed.

Qwen 3.8 (and maybe soon 4) series models are probably the best right now for local AI. Specifically, for lower end hardware like 8gb GPUs you might find a lot of use in a Qwen 3.8 variant like Underdog Saluki 27B.

I might not need them but I'll sure as hell take them if they are available

>> But do people need the capabilities beyond what can be reasonably achieved with local models?

Yes? If you're building anything reasonably complex, it is a ton of work to keep everything in your head so that different parts of the system work seamlessly and work you do in one area does not adversely affect another area.

How much did you spend on your local setup out of curiosity?

Also, yes, I do need the capabilities beyond what can be reasonably achieved with local models because threat actors are also using frontier models.

They are faster, but the distance from superior is changing daily. Naturally, things like purposefully kneecapping the product does not help.

>much faster.

This really depends on your infrastructure. In this case it all depends on your hardware, and there is no secret sauce, you can buy the same GPUs or better than the big players are using. Self-hostef GLM in our company is faster than any commercial model. Of course the hardware was not cheap, but completely manageable for a medium or large company.

Speed can mean two things: rate of token generation or time to finish a task. What maters it the later and a model that takes a faster path to the result and uses fewer tokens because of that comes out ahead in practice.

> you can buy the same GPUs or better than the big players are using

You can not buy an H100.