How do you reconcile these ideas with the fact that cheap open weight models are only slightly behind the state of the art?
If anything, I would bet that next year you could get today’s flagship performance for significantly cheaper via an open-weights model.
By that time, the hypebeasts will be explaining how worthless the models of today always were.
Sure, but there will always be some monstrosities like Mythos that'll pwn all software written by local models in 0.01 seconds, thus forcing people/companies to use the most advanced paid models to keep up and stay unpwned for 1 second longer.
(Timeframes are hyperbolical).
You can easily develop with models like GLM 5.1 and Kimi k2.6 at a fraction of the cost of GPT 5.5 or Opus 4.7. Requests often cost just a few cents.
Open-source models have caught up tremendously recently. Those who can’t or don’t want to invest a lot of money can already develop with Kimi and GLM without any problems. We don’t have to wait another year for that.