alt Hacker NewsThe rush towards open weight models defeats this thesis. There’s no prize for being “ahead.” That’s academically interesting but a terrible business plan. 99% of AI use cases don’t need the latest and greatest model, and businesses increasingly understand this.
That's like saying "forklifts are a terrible idea, because a forklift is excessive for lifting 99% of the items that I can lift". See the problem?
"AI use cases" is a moving target! If you try to define "use cases" by "what AIs today can be used to do", you miss things AIs would do in the future. The more capable and price-performant AIs get, the more there are places where AI has a role.
This is a big part of what the frontier buys you.
The other big part is that going from a local AI to a frontier model often makes the difference between "this use case works 60% of the time, good tech demo" and "this use case works 99% of the time, good business decision". The difference between "clunky and needs human in the loop" and "just works" is worth paying the API price.