Agreed, and assuming local open AI models start catching up, which they seem to be doing, the foundation models' hold on society gets a lot slipperier. If there's a "what to do about all this" from an engineer's standpoint, pushing the needle toward local models, whether in research, agents, or just using them, understanding how they work, and advocating for them when it makes sense (which is more often than they get credit for) is probably the best ROI.

While I agree with you on open models getting better, I have been starting to see how the value, the reason you pay for Claude, isn’t in the models.

For example, I just hooked Claude desktop up to my outlook to build a report for my timesheet then I used the chrome extension to fill it out automatically with that data. It could read Jira tickets if that’s where the information was.

A local model can’t do that for me because I have to get the rest of the integration software somewhere.

I also think this is why OpenAI is the worst positioned of the group of AI giants. Anthropic is trying to make a productivity operating system, while ChatGPT is basically just a website until recently.