its not about whether you can shock anyone, if anyone is driving cars outside, you can't say you have SOTA-horse to go from A to B.
When models are good, expectations are adjusted accordingly to deliver things on par with the whole industry, you can't just say, I have built my own Intel Pentium II, now I will try to use it to compile Electron App and run 3DS Max there
Maybe not in absolute terms. But if there is no access to the actual SOTA models, it's as if they don't exist.
You don't need SOTA-level LLMs to create value with AI. Hell, you can build good solutions with a simple small finetuned models.
> When models are good, expectations are adjusted accordingly to deliver things on par with the whole industry, you can't just say, I have built my own Intel Pentium II, now I will try to use it to compile Electron App and run 3DS Max there.
I know you are taking your analogy to its breaking point but it really depends on what you are doing. I know people that use 10+-year old thinkpads and they do just fine.