> Yes, some frontier models are much better but users can still chose to use cheaper models for most of the work. In fact most applications, through which people will interact with LLMs anyway, will not need frontier models unless they offer "chat with AI"

I am finding some really routine tasks to be borderline with frontier models. Performing E2E testing of enterprise web apps would clearly disintegrate with local models. You need that reasoning black box on top. I don't care what your favorite benchmark says. I care about what actually fucking works.

The people who don't understand the economic situation are those who are in the pure play space with AI and multi agent circuses. Why bother spending any money when the occasional failure has literally no consequences? Who in their right mind would pre-pay for tokens?! I wish I could see the statistics on what % of HN uses AI for fun vs for work. It is clearly a kind of Factorio entertainment experience for a lot of people. If I was just using it for entertainment this whole IPO business would look really silly to me too.