I agree the genie is out of the bottle technologically. I'm less convinced that means access stops being politically and economically important. The bottle may be gone but the best lamps are still expensive

But a “good enough” lamp just got a lot cheaper. The cost of tokens on DeepSeek V4 Pro is so low I don’t even think about and currently am trying to figure out useful things for as many agents simultaneously running as I can. What would have cost $150 less than a year ago now costs 35¢.

Likewise Qwen 3.6 absolutely blows me away and that’s on a 35b 6-bit model on a local 5090. Same thing, busy trying to find stuff to do to keep it busy 24/7.

I can still find some niches for Opus 4.7 but being able to attack problems and not worry about consumption is a game changer.

Virtually no one is going to pay for the best performing lamp if the next best lamp does 90% as good for an order of magnitude cheaper.

I will say, as pointed out by others, DeepSeek and other Chinese providers still lack a bit in the tooling that Claude has, but they'll get there.