I agree that many AI businesses will go bust and they deserve it, but the tech is good.

I can recommend my own layered approach, using the lowest capability models that get stuff done:

1. I maximally use local models like gemma4:26b-a4b-it-qat for everything that works with this free option.

2. I like paying for inexpensive APIs for mid-tier models like deepseek v4 flash, gcp-5-mini, gemini-2-flash for things that option 1. fails at. This option is almost free.

3. Pay for more expensive APIs like deepseek v4 pro, gemini 3.5 flash, etc. This option is not too expensive.

4. If all else fails on a class of tasks, then pay for awesomeness of Claude Opus. $$ expensive, I try not to use unless absolutely necessary.

I think developers and companies that just cram everything into Claude Opus are unprofessional.

I think you are conflating LLMs with AI.

LLMs we all agreed were amazing back in 2023-2024.

What's happening now with AI is more of a corporate phenomenon quite removed from the actual tech.

Yes LLMs are useful, but replacing customer support with an LLM that gives user accounts away, or calling LLMs on a loop where the bottleneck is your checkbook and calling it AGI, those are phenomenons that are separate from LLMs.