The above comment said:
> need to buy tokens from a handfull of tech companies to run their businesses or make their products
That's clearly indicating necessity.
That would indeed be concerning if it was the case, but it's not.
So now the case is just "you can pay more money to do things faster".
And guess what? That's been the case for centuries if not millennia. Nothing special or concerning at all.
And so your analogy is misleading. You're trying to imply that only a tiny number (2-3?) of companies make the tools, and nobody else does. You either pay those companies, or you don't get them.
That's just false. There are hundreds of companies that will sell you tokens - just not for frontier models. The correct analogy is how Samsung, Google, and Apple make the best phones in the world, so you can buy from one of them - or you can buy a still-good but not bleeding-edge phone from another vendor. And everyone is fine with that.
Correct. I have to pay Anthropic to use Claude models. Open-weight models are significantly worse than frontier cloud models. Their cell phone-equivalent would call your boss when you try to call your spouse, randomly delete photos you took with it, fail to send text messages half the time, power off when it still has 50% battery.
Still incorrect.
Models are always stochastic. They always have a chance of failure. That includes the most expensive frontier models.
You're making an invalid comparison to cellphones by claiming that there are cellphones that spontaneously and regularly do those things (which is wrong) vs flagship phones that don't (which is extremely wrong).
Either that, or you're claiming that the difference between frontier models and open models is the difference between actual flagship phones and these hypothetical ultra-buggy phones. Which is also wrong, because of the above fact that frontier models and open models are both stochastic, and because on many public benchmarks (e.g. Artificial Analysis) the gaps between the best frontier models and the best open models are far smaller than your analogy claims.
The fact is that, while frontier models are better than open models, you can still do a lot of work with open models. You're in no way "screwed" like you're trying to imply either with the incorrect phone analogy or the incorrect power tools analogy above.