Open-source AI is just “4 months behind” closed frontier models — and 10x cheaper

The New Stack · 2 days ago

Open-source and open-weight AI models are claimed to be approximately four months behind proprietary frontier models while costing roughly ten times less per token, with Featherless demonstrating annual costs of $90,000 for their optimized GLM 5.2 model versus $1.5 million for GPT-5.5 or Claude Opus at 100 billion monthly tokens. The cost comparison shows that enterprises paying for proprietary models are primarily paying for enterprise wrapper features like integration and observability rather than raw model intelligence. As open-source models improve and approach frontier capability levels, enterprises may find themselves locked into expensive proprietary contracts while open alternatives become increasingly viable alternatives.