[lhl]

For fungible things, it's easy to cost out. But not all things can be broken down just in token cost, especially as people start building their lives around specific models.

Even beyond privacy just the availability is out of your control - you can look at r/ChatGPT's collective spasm yesterday when 4o was taken from them, but basically, you have no guarantees to access for services, and for LLM models in particular, "upgrades" can completely change behavior/services that you depend on.

Google has been even worse in the past here, I've seen them deprecate model versions with 1 month notices. It seems a lot of model providers are doing dynamic model switching/quanting/reasoning effort adjustments based on load now.