Open Source Rising | a16z

Frontier models keep getting better, but open source alternatives are keeping pace:

A proprietary model (Claude Opus 4.6) is still the “most intelligent,” but the gap between it and the next best open weight model has closed substantially.

Open models are nearly replicating the performance of leading proprietary models (on certain dimensions, at least), but they’re often a fraction of the cost.

The relative cost advantage of open models seems pretty apparent to users, as well.

Open weight models have jumped into the token consumption leaderboard, according to OpenRouter.

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