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A 17GB open-weight model running on a consumer laptop is now competitive with the best proprietary models from a year ago, demonstrating rapid progress in local LLM capability.

The author considers it remarkable that a 17GB model can run locally and match what the most expensive proprietary models could do just a year ago. The only remaining limitation is inference speed. ✦ AI generated

Simon Willison · Simon Willison's Weblog · 2026-08-16 · original ↗

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The fact that a 17GB file can do all of this stuff on my home machines is a miracle. Once again, I'm delighted and amazed at how much progress local models have made this year. A year ago this would have been competitive with the best and most expensive of the proprietary models - today it can run on a capable laptop.

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✳ Qwen 3.8 27B

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Qwen 3.8 27B is highly accurate at generating bounding box coordinates for objects in photographs, producing near-perfect results on its first attempt.Simon Willison · Simon Willison's Weblog · conf 70%

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supports → Kimi K3 shows open weight models can stand toe-to-toe with proprietary frontier ones.Simon Willison · Simon Willison's Weblog provides context → Open-weight models can be run locally, fine-tuned with proprietary data, and used entirely offline — this is a real benefit to US companies and breeds innovation independent of frontier labs.CJ · Syntax