It's a tough thing, I'm a solo dev supporting ~all at high quality. I cannot imagine using anything other than $X[1] at the leading edge. Why not have the very best?

Karpathy elides he is an individual. We expect to find a distribution of individuals, such that a nontrivial # of them are fine with 5-10% off the leading edge performance. Why? At least for free as in beer. At most, concerns about connectivity, IP rights, and so on.

[1] gpt-5 finally dethroned sonnet after 7 months

Today's qwen3 30b is about as good as last year's state of the art. For me that's more than good enough. Many tasks don't require the best of the best either.