Are open models as good as ChatGPT or Claude?

For many everyday tasks, the best open-weight models are close to the leading closed models. On the hardest reasoning and long agentic coding tasks, the top closed models usually still lead. The gap has narrowed to months rather than years.

Recent open models from DeepSeek, Moonshot (Kimi), Qwen and Zhipu (GLM) score near closed frontier models on many public benchmarks for coding, math and writing. They are strong enough for drafting, summarizing, extraction, search over your documents and most coding help.

Check the specific task. Run your own prompts on a short list of models before you commit. Public leaderboards are a starting point, not a verdict.

Size matters. A small model that fits on a laptop is not in the same class as a 600 billion parameter model. Many people judge local AI by small models and underrate what the large open models can do.

Updated Oct 26, 2026