OTOH, using the best is a competitive advantage when time = money. It's like giving your engineers a slow laptop because it's cheaper. It may be cheaper but not worth the cost.

> OTOH, using the best is a competitive advantage when time = money. It's like giving your engineers a slow laptop because it's cheaper. It may be cheaper but not worth the cost.

That doesn't imply giving your devs the best laptop makes any difference.

How much more productive will your devs be if you upgrade them from a 32GB RAM, 8-core laptop to a 768GB RAM 96-core threadripper?

In your analogy, Kimi may not be the 4-core celeron with 4GB of RAM, it's more like the 8-core AMD with 32GB of RAM.

Not necessarily, inference speed also has huge time aspect. For example anthropic takes nearly twice as long as OpenAI models for my tasks with both having similar success rates.