If you can get something almost as capable for a fiftieth of the price, in most cases you'll do that. You might still send a few tokens to the more expensive option for the exceptional, difficult cases, but that's maybe 10% of the tokens at most. I don't see how it'll be possible to keep spending what anthropic, openai, google etc are spending if they're only going to see the trickiest 10% of tokens.

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MiiMe19 a day ago | parent [-]

Missed the point award

	▲	kybernetikos a day ago \| parent [-]
		Maybe I need to spell out the step that connects them - how will those companies afford to keep "iterating forward at the frontier" when they probably have a huge crash in their income coming from competition with good enough, but 1/50th the price cheaper and open models. Iterating forward at the frontier doesn't seem like a sustainable approach if everyone else can catch up with you in 6 months.