They can also be used for other things than running the main frontier whatever model as well.

E.g. grok isn't truly multi-modal, it has a callable tool that is a separate VLM it invokes on image URLs or files (for a long time it was grok-1.5v, but I think they have upgraded now, it was pretty bad).

And then you have the small summarizer models for the CoT/thought traces, the guidable summarizer models for the standard browse tools, etc.

There's a ton of stuff that can use an aging GPU.