senordevnyc

If you’re using open weight models to code basically the same as you always have been but just a little faster, while your competitors are using frontier models to go 10x faster, you haven’t saved anything.

Now, granted, the real question comes down to whether they’re going 10x faster, and whether that’ll hold up in the long term. But that’s the gamble as I see it. And to me, open weight models aren’t worth the risk. $200 is 0.5% of my little company’s revenue. It would be foolish of me to try and save that money.

But in this case it seems like it's led your reasoning astray into this perspective where a small open weight model you can run on cheap hardware is just as good as the value you get from paying $200 to Anthropic. The reality is that it's not even close, at least for some people's use cases.

I really doubt I'll ever need to use local models, even in a scenario where the big labs stop doing subscriptions (unlikely), I could just pay API rates for the open weight models through OpenRouter, or just pay for API rates for Sonnet 5.5 or GPT 6.1 Sol, and adjust my workflows a bit. Still worth it.

I don't know, there are a LOT of things I worry about with AI, but what I'm going to do when the big labs drop subscriptions isn't even in my top 10. Probably not my top 20. Just a non-factor.

You clearly have an ideological issue with these companies, but I don’t share your views or your values. They could cut me off tomorrow but it wouldn’t kill my business. Worst case, I’d have to figure out how to make do with what you’re already choosing to do today.

And I work for myself, so no, not automating myself out of a job.

Although I suppose I’m automating the people I won’t hire now out of a future potential job.

Putting aside the absurd straw man, you’re touching on an important point: these small open weight models are sufficient for how you like to work, but it’s not remotely good enough for how I like to work. Opus 5.5 is barely sufficient for how I like to work (many parallel work streams, as little of me in the loop as possible, etc).

Also, if I wanted to generate Sonnet 4.6-quality tokens, maybe your suggested setup is the better approach (though I still highly doubt it), but I don’t. I want Opus 5.5 / Fable 5.1 level of quality, because the ROI in terms of human-in-the-loop time saved and how much better and faster I can build is worth WAY more than $200 / month to me. That’s basically a rounding error for my business.

If so, then yeah, increasing efficiency 100x means we hit that point much faster.

If not, then it just means we make improvements 100x faster.

I don't understand this argument, it’s not like humans and LLMs are engaging in some kind of competition with strict rules where ONLY the raw LLM responses “count” or something.

How comforting is it really when it’s not the bare LLM beating you, but the LLM using tools it created?

Even if he turns out to be a decade or two off, that’s basically exactly correct in the sweep of history sense.

Wild time to be alive.

I’m more skeptical of the minimum wage one, I think the details there matter a lot, and raising the minimum wage too much too fast can indeed be worse for just about everyone.

But rent control? Really?

It’s also interesting to me how a certain segment of the political persuasion simply cannot resist the allure of price controls, and no amount of data or historical experience seems to convince them that it’s generally a bad idea.

Excellent trolling, hats off to you!

Guess what could help solve it? :)

Seriously though, this “problem” will never be fully solved, we’ll just get better and better at connecting AI to the broader world, and to me that’s already the story of the last few years. Models get better, they’re able to build and drive tools to interact with both the digital and physical world better, which helps build the next generation of models, and so on.

And unless my math skills are completely off, it’s about 21 months, not two years, but fair enough. What 18 month period in that range would you like to consider as validating the ridiculous idea that open weight models are going to eat Anthropic’s lunch?

And the cost of training is going down as a percentage of revenue over time, is it not?

Reality can’t be saturated. The set of things you can accomplish with more intelligence is unbounded. So while cheap models will continue to proliferate, there will always be a massive market at the frontier, and that won’t ever change.