Comment by eloisant
7 hours ago
> It is my conviction that in this space, if you're not the best in the world, you're losing
I disagree on that point. Models are getting good enough that you can switch them and barely notice. I'm switching between Opus, GPT Codex and GLM 5.3 for coding and I can barely tell the difference.
I think they'll become more like telcos than anything, selling a commodity. It's even truer when any provider can host open weight models like GLM-5.3.
Basically a world with dozens of Baseten, with AI labs having a hard time monetizing, just like editors of open source software.
I can tell the difference between the SOTA and GLM 5.3, and paying a few hundred for the better models is definitely worth it.
Mistral does not offer a model that makes sense to use. I understand they now host the already outdated GLM 5.2, courtesy of China providing the weights. And Mistral offers this for 2x-3x the price of other providers.
This is supposed to be a success story?
I'm sure you can tell the difference.
But for the vast majority of usage GLM 5.3 or Deepseek V4 is enough.
Even people who do need frontier model will soon restrict it to the use cases that really need it and switch to cheaper models for the rest. It has already started.
Anthropic and OpenAI will never get enough customers paying top dollar to deliver on the revenue they need to offset their investments.
I suspect that opinions in that direction might be the result of a lack of ambition in applying agentic AI.
The cheap models are good enough for what exactly? AI assisted development, or working autonomously on a task for 4 hours?
As long as the best available model does the latter more reliably and with noticeably better results, it is easily worth spending a few hundred per month for me.
The idea that OpenAI and Anthropic cannot make enough profit in my opinion depends entirely on how large the gap is going to be.
Will the gap become smaller with improvements starting to slow, or will it get wider as the labs successfully apply their models to research and improvements speed up?
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