alt Hacker Newsthe counter point is that building or selecting the specialized model may cost as much as the lifetime inference costs of the task with the specialized model.
If I need to pay someone 300k to make the model and infrastructure... then I would need to process many documents to recoup my OCR costs compared to asking claude code nicely.
Perhaps the model zoo is becoming good enough that the cost to find a specialized model is not so high?
Sure, but things like "OCR tool" or "agentic calendar assistant" or "agentic interface to CAD" don't feel like things I'd need pay 300k to build out custom infrastructure for, they feel like something lots of people/companies would rather pay an appropriate-sized subscription to a model optimized for that use case rather than burn ludicrous amounts on generalist models optimized for burning as many tokens as possible reasoning about how to update a calendar from first principles.
I mean, I also I think the "agentic calendar assistant" is more likely to come out of the Valley than Europe[1] and that the big AI startups will buy some of the niche AI startups gaining traction in strategic markets, but there are lots of niches that notionally benefit from transformer-based models
[1]probably a calendar assistant with a ludicrously inflated valuation based mostly on the assumption that Google/Meta/Anthropic will buy them to shut them down three years later...