[intrasight]

> get cheaper to run

Irrelevant. The model is the moat

> most companies don’t care about that.

Wrong. They will use the model that gives them an edge. If they are using a PhD but their competitors are using Einstein, they will lose.

> center a div

For sure a common use case, but is bot what the CEO is concerned about with AI.

[vidarh]

> Wrong. They will use the model that gives them an edge. If they are using a PhD but their competitors are using Einstein, they will lose.

For some tasks that matters. But for a lot of tasks, "good enough but cheaper" will win out.

I'm sure there will be a market for whichever company has the best model, but just like most companies don't hire many PhD's, most companies won't feel a need for the highest end models either, above a certain level.

E.g. with the release of Sonnet 4.6, I switched a lot of my processes from Opus to Sonnet, because Sonnet 4.6 is good enough, and it means I can do more for less.

But I'm also experimenting with Kimi, Qwen, Deepseek, and others for a number of tasks, including fine-grained switching and interleaving. E.g. have a cheap but dumb model filter data or take over when a sub-task is simple enough, in order to have the smart model do less, for example.

[intrasight]

Models will get smarter and cheaper. For those that are burned directly into silicon, there will be a market for old models - as the alternative is to dump that silicon in a landfill.

For models that run on general-purpose AI hardware, I don't know why the vendors would waste that resource on old models.

[janalsncm]

> The model is the moat

What model? GPT4o certainly isn’t a moat for open ai. They need to keep training better and better models because qwen3, kimi k2.5 etc constantly nipping at their heels.

> Wrong. They will use the model that gives them an edge. If they are using a PhD but their competitors are using Einstein, they will lose.

It depends on the business. As much as I’d love to engage a PhD or an Einstein in my Verizon customer support call, it isn’t going to net the call center any value to pay for that extra compute.

[intrasight]

It's a moat. Yes, they must keep refilling it, but it's all they have.

My PhD vs Einstein analogy was bad. What I mean is stupid vs smart. Nobody is going to pay for a stupid model when they can pay a bit more for smart.

[robotpepi]

> If they are using a PhD but their competitors are using

god what are these assumptions

[intrasight]

More analogy than assumption. And admittedly a poor analogy.