The current open models are good but still require quite a bit of hand-holding and/or expensive hardware. E.g. you need something like $80k to buy hardware to run Kimi locally with adequate performance. Qwen 3.6 runs well on a laptop but requires a lot of hand-holding and time.

But even with all that, there's really no lack of enthusiasts experimenting with open models. The whole field reminds me of the mid-2000s explosion of open source and Internet-related projects. But faster moving and with a lot more people.

It just takes some time to filter down to the level of kernel development. It's by nature very conservative.