Comment by jerf

While that particular API might be nice, and people and companies should probably push back against the obfuscation, in the end it doesn't really matter. When I hand off between different models I already have the first model prepare a markdown file for the second rather than just importing the entire original thread wholesale, because that's expensive anyhow, and also rather unfocused. They can't get their models to stop generating that sort of checkpoint because that's a fundamental operation necessary for all the harnesses to work anyhow.

The fundamental technology of LLMs and arguably AI in general strongly cuts against that sort of lockin. Handoff is a fundamental capability. There's no option to encrypt the docs or write it in some dialect only one model understands because humans need to understand it to, which stops that whole line dead in its tracks for at least the forseeable future. An AI can already today pick up such pieces, how much more easily will they do it tomorrow?

If they want to lock me in, they're going to need to provide a feature that I need so badly I can't switch and nobody else has. It is hard to see what that would be, other than being a generally better model.