alt Hacker NewsFor some use-cases, like making big complex changes to big complex important code or doing important research, you're pretty much always going to prefer the best model rather than leave intelligence on the table.
For other use-cases, like translations or basic queries, there's a "good enough".
Replies
m11a • 08/08/2025
Agree, for now.
But the foundation models will eventually hit a limit, and the open-source ecosystem, which trails by around a year or two, will catch up.
That depends on what you value, though. If local control is that important to you for whatever reason (owning your own destiny, privacy, whatever), you might find that trade off acceptable.
And I expect that over time the gap will narrow. Sure, it's likely that commercially-built LLMs will be a step ahead of the open models, but -- just to make up numbers -- say today the commercially-built ones are 50% better. I could see that narrowing to 5% or something like that, after some number of years have passed. Maybe 5% is a reasonable trade-off for some people to make, depending on what they care about.
Also consider that OpenAI, Anthropic, et al. are all burning through VC money like nobody's business. That money isn't going to last forever. Maybe at some point Anthropic's Pro plan becomes $100/mo, and Max becomes $500-$1000/mo. Building and maintaining your own hardware, and settling for the not-quite-the-best models might be very much worth it.