Originally published on AI Tech Connect.
Where the gap stands now For most of the past two years the honest answer to "should we use an open model?" was "not for anything that matters". The quality gap between downloadable weights and the closed frontier was wide enough that, for a serious product, a frontier API was the only defensible choice. That answer is now genuinely contested, and the change has happened fast. According to Artificial Analysis' Intelligence Index, Moonshot AI's Kimi K2.6 and Xiaomi's MiMo V2.5 Pro are the leading open-weight models, each scoring 54. That places them within roughly 3-6 points of leading proprietary models such as GPT-5.5, which the same index puts at 60. Across the wider field, Artificial Analysis' figures suggest open-weight quality has closed to within about 5-15 points of closed frontier…
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