Every 4-6 months, a new open-weights model is released, sparking intense debate about how close open models have come to matching the best closed, frontier systems. The latest standout is Z.ai’s GLM 5, currently the top open-weights model from a Chinese developer. Over the past year, a key development in this story is that nearly all the prominent open discussion models now originate from China, whereas they used to be dominated by Meta’s Llama series. These discussion moments always prompt reflection for me. Despite being one of open models‘ strongest advocates, I consistently find the prevailing narrative overstated — open models are not meaningfully closing the gap with the best closed models in terms of raw performance. The roughly 6-month gap remains stable. At the same time, it’s worth talking about what happens as open models continue to improve dramatically. Open models are keeping pace with the top closed models far more closely than I—and many other experts tracking the ecosystem—anticipated. On paper, the leading US labs — Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google — possess far greater resources for training and research. In this world, many anticipated a more clearly widening gap between the top open and closed models.
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