Or something that goes against the general opinions of the community? Vibes are the only benchmark that counts after all.
I tend to agree with the flow on most things but my thoughts that I’d consider going against the grain:
- QwQ was think-slop and was never that good
- Qwen3-32B is still SOTA for 32GB and under. I cannot get anything to reliably beat it despite shiny benchmarks
- Deepseek is still open-weight SotA. I’ve really tried Kimi, GLM, and Qwen3’s larger variants but asking Deepseek still feels like asking the adult in the room. Caveat is GLM codes better
- (proprietary bonus): Grok 4 handles news data better than GPT-5 or Gemini 2.5 and will always win if you ask it about something that happened that day.
GPT-OSS:120b is really good.
Tools are powerful and make local inference on cheap hardware good enough for most people.
DSPy is pretty cool.
Intel caught my attention at the begin of 2025, but seems to have given up on their software stack. I regret buying cheap Arcs for inference.
Inference on AMD is good enough for production.