For what I do, that works. In exchange I get privacy, i get to not fund the big labs eating the world, I get to not worry about hitting plan limits, and I don't have to worry about them killing my account if I ask about the wrong thing.
I think most people unfortunately don't care about any of those things, or at least they don't care enough as we are about to see by the trillion dollar IPOs of these AI megalabs.
Anthropic continues to serve haiku - which suggests people have a use for less-than sota models.
A bugatti is undoubtedly a higher performance car than a honda civic. Yet if you're commuting to work in rush hour traffic, both cars will get you there in the same amount of time - and one is going to cost you a lot less.
The pitch of the frontier labs is that you need a bugatti for everything. I don't buy that.
In fact, it's usually my use of more capable models that I've instructed to delegate low-level work to these less capable models that is resulting in my haiku et al usage.
The bicycle will still get you there.
It will just take much longer depending on how far you have to go, and there are some things that, no matter how hard you try, the bike will simply not be able to do that a truck can, such as haul heavy loads from one place to another.
You don't need to drive the pickup truck around everywhere. Certainly you can just take your bike if you're traveling a reasonable distance and you don't need to bring a bunch of stuff with you.
But it sure is nice to have a truck sometimes.