But who needs SOTA models, really? It was necessary 10 months ago, but now?

All things equal, let's say your SaaS startup uses GPT 5.0 (release 10 months ago) and my business uses Fable 5. We have the same business goals, same talent level, same strategies. I think the chance of my business winning against yours is higher.

I can't prove it. It's just my opinion.

It's easy to agree to that, but you're disregarding that the resources you spend on the stronger model could be allocated elsewhere. Conversely, you're assuming that spending more on AI will always yield better results and be worth it, compared to spending the money on other things.

This might actually still hold true now, or or at least many actors in the market behave that way. But I'm not so sure there isn't a cliff to that effect. At some point, if SOTA models remain expensive, it'll turn into a market advantage to figure out how to get things done without depending on the most expensive tooling available.

Similar scenario, different phrasing: if your company relies on overqualified workers to deliver 100% quality, the market may still decide that it's fine to go with 90% quality for 50% the price.

@orwin has claimed that SOTA LLMs have already hit that diminishing return where spending more money on a SOTA LLM today does not add more value than a non-SOTA LLM (assuming high value tasks).

I never said there will never be a diminishing return. I'm challenging the statement that we've already hit.

Note: We're still scaling chip nodes. It's still worth it for TSMC and chip design companies to invest hundreds of billions into every new chip node every 2-3 years. This is after decades of scaling already.

Your business is spending way, way, way more for compute. How can you ignore the economic of your business? That’s pretty much what a business is about

I'd guess it depends on the type of business. If it's some genuinely deep technical space, the model would give an edge but even then I think luck would be a significant factor. In a monte carlo of such scenarios, the business with the stronger model might win 6 out of 10 times, but it's no sure thing between the two of us. If we were comparing two businesses building Yet Another Generic CRUD, I would guess it's closer... perhaps even a net-negative to spend money on Fable versus marketing.

Ceteris paribus, all other things are never equal.

That’s nonsense and saying “nah-ah” with Latin won’t improve your argument.

If we couldn’t isolate a variable we would never be able to argue.

Using a better model is an advantage even if only for the coders. There are a million ways to turn that into profit, both proper and not so proper but that’s the beauty of ceteris paribus: the other factors do not matter now.

> There are a million ways to turn that into profit

Mind pointing where that profit for companies consuming AI is? I don’t mean hypotheticals. Where are the proof that current AI contributes positively to ROI?

I think the chance of success of the GPT 5.0 startup is higher since they aren’t just gonna be relying on Fable to vibe code some slop saas.

I was thinking about Opus 4.5 when i talked about 10 month ago, but maybe i'm confusing the date, it might have been 9 month.

Opus 4.5 vs Fable 5? i think the output difference will be negligible, and the opportunity cost of paying an order of magnitude more will actually benefit my business.

There is literally no moat…

Then start your company and go compete against OpenAI and Anthropic then.

Heck, just take Kimi K3 and start your training run from that.

thank you for that great contribution to the discussion...