I Spent a Week with OpenClaw AI Tool. Here's What $0 Solved That Thousands… | faisal Al khunizan

In 2023, open-source models lagged 18 months behind closed frontier models. By early 2024, that gap shrank to 12 months. By late 2024, Epoch AI measured the consumer-hardware gap at just 7 months. In January 2025, DeepSeek R1 — an open reasoning model — matched OpenAI's o1, sending shockwaves through the industry. By mid-2025, Qwen 3, Kimi K2, and GLM-4.5 had open-source models rivaling closed ones on most key benchmarks. An internal Google memo in 2023 admitted it plainly: "We have no moat. Open source is lapping us."

Today's frontier — Claude Opus 4.5, the upcoming Claude Sonnet — represents the bleeding edge. Give it six months. Open-source alternatives will deliver 90% of that capability at zero licensing cost. GPT-4-level performance that cost $30 per million tokens in 2023 now costs under $1. That's a 30x price collapse in two years.