Comment by Aurornis
2 hours ago
> The damage is done. You cannot build a business critical function on top of American SOTA frontier model. Especially not with the current crew in charge.
The switching costs of changing LLM providers is as low as it gets. All the individuals and startups I know try different models all of the time, even down to the level of choosing which provider to use based on the task. Bigger companies move slower but only because they have lawyers and teams negotiating contracts, not because there is a technical reason that it's hard to switch.
Companies have dealt with supply chain unpredictability by having multiple providers and switching between them since forever. It's infinitely easier to switch LLM providers than it is to deal with physical supply chain uncertainty.
> The switching costs of changing LLM providers is as low as it gets
Not trivial, you would need to do lots of evals and prompt tuning when you switch models.
imagine what happens when you optimize your agent skills to the current model, and new model starts breaking. you would need to have versioning for your skills, serving different skills based on the model while you do A/B testing
For real production I find the switching cost is not as trivial as you portray. Even going to a new model version in the same model family, say GPT-4o to GPT-5.2, a transition I just finished on a not too complicated application, requires extensive retesting and tweaking of prompts, guardrails and parameters.
Maybe OP meant switching in a coding harness way? Not an application using AI? I had similar issues like you in the latter case, but in the former it's trivial.
Exactly!
Even if you won't be able to use some model tomorrow, you can still make money by using it today!
And in the age of limited compute, spiky workloads and constant outages, building a mechanism to fallback to a weaker model when your primary choice isn't available is smart anyway.
For many, that fallback mechanism is simply called Cursor - soon to be owned by Elon Musk. Which opens up a similar but slightly different can of worms...
Well, there are many alternatives to Cursor as well.