Hm. I think there is a bit of a shifting goalpost dynamic at play here. Those April releases, even the fast MoE versions, are better than big cloud models from 18 months ago. I remember when everyone was gushing about Sonnet 3.7 and what a transformative experience development was using it. So was it useful or wasn’t it? A tool doesn’t lose its usability just because a better one comes along.

To me, these small local LLMs are highly useful (and this “usable”) even though they don’t match the output of today’s frontier models.