Why would AI be one of the few areas where locally-hosted options can't reach "good enough"?

ac29 9 days ago | parent | next [-]

Maybe a better question is when will SOTA models be "good enough"?

At the moment there appears to be ~no demand for older models, even models that people praised just a few months ago. I suspect until AGI/ASI is reached or progress plateaus, that will continue be the case.

	▲	lexh 9 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The current SOTA closed model providers are also all rolling out access to their latest models with better pricing (e.g. GPT-5 this week), which seems like a confounding factor unique to this moment in the cycle. An API consumer would need to have a very specific reason to choose GPT-4o over GPT-5, given the latter costs less, benchmarks better and is roughly the same speed.
	▲	jeremyjh 9 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Yes, this is exactly my point. Thank you for stating it better.

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hombre_fatal 10 days ago | parent | prev [-]

For some use-cases, like making big complex changes to big complex important code or doing important research, you're pretty much always going to prefer the best model rather than leave intelligence on the table.

For other use-cases, like translations or basic queries, there's a "good enough".

	▲	kelnos 10 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		That depends on what you value, though. If local control is that important to you for whatever reason (owning your own destiny, privacy, whatever), you might find that trade off acceptable. And I expect that over time the gap will narrow. Sure, it's likely that commercially-built LLMs will be a step ahead of the open models, but -- just to make up numbers -- say today the commercially-built ones are 50% better. I could see that narrowing to 5% or something like that, after some number of years have passed. Maybe 5% is a reasonable trade-off for some people to make, depending on what they care about. Also consider that OpenAI, Anthropic, et al. are all burning through VC money like nobody's business. That money isn't going to last forever. Maybe at some point Anthropic's Pro plan becomes $100/mo, and Max becomes $500-$1000/mo. Building and maintaining your own hardware, and settling for the not-quite-the-best models might be very much worth it.
	▲	m11a 9 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Agree, for now. But the foundation models will eventually hit a limit, and the open-source ecosystem, which trails by around a year or two, will catch up.