Table of Contents
Llama 3.3 70B, Qwen 2.5 72B, and DeepSeek-V3 are all open-weight. Claude 3.5 Sonnet, GPT-4o, and Gemini Pro 2 are closed. The quality gap has narrowed but is real.
TL;DR
Open-weight 70B-class models are now ~85-90% of Claude 3.5 Sonnet on most tasks. Closed frontier still wins on hardest reasoning, vision, and tool-use complexity. Open wins on cost, customisation, data control. Most teams should use both.
Quality gap
- General Q&A: open ~95% of closed
- Code: open ~90% (DeepSeek-Coder strong)
- Hard reasoning (MATH, ARC-hard): open ~80%
- Vision / multimodal: open ~70%
- Long-context coherence: open ~85%
By workload
- Production chatbot: open wins (cost)
- RAG over docs: open wins (customisation)
- Code generation: open wins (DeepSeek-Coder ~Claude quality)
- Hard reasoning agent: closed wins (Claude Sonnet)
- Vision tasks: closed wins (GPT-4o, Claude)
- Customer-facing reliability: hybrid (open for steady, closed for hardest)
Verdict
Hybrid wins. Open-weight covers ~80% of the volume; closed handles the long tail of hardest queries.
Bottom line
Mix open and closed. Use a router. See private cloud vs public API.
