It isn't a commodity product in my opinion. Far from it. I think it will ultimately be a monopoly or duopoly for SOTA. The mid to low end is commodity, yes. But SOTA models are not commodities.

The number of competitors for SOTA drops by a few every year. The winners make more money, get more revenue, buy more compute, train better model with compute, buy best talent, and the cycle goes.

I think it's easier to fall behind and never catch back up than people think. One disastrous training run can leave a lab months to a year behind. For example, Meta's disastrous LLAMA 4 models. Meta is lucky to have their ads business as a funding source. However, Anthropic's revenue is growing so fast, that ability to use ads as a funding source to stay in the race may not last much longer for Meta.

To me, SOTA LLM training is very much like new chip fab nodes. One disastrous node can put you behind for many years or forever. The cost to build the next chip node doubles every every 4 years (Rock's law). The cost to train the next SOTA model likely has some similar power law which means over time, it's too costly for losers to keep up. The only reason TSMC isn't a defacto monopoly for advanced chip nodes is strictly due to geopolitics.

▲

orwin an hour ago | parent | next [-]

But who needs SOTA models, really? It was necessary 10 months ago, but now?

▲

aurareturn an hour ago | parent [-]

All things equal, let's say your SaaS startup uses GPT 5.0 (release 10 months ago) and my business uses Fable 5. We have the same business goals, same talent level, same strategies. I think the chance of my business winning against yours is higher.

I can't prove it. It's just my opinion.

▲

Valodim an hour ago | parent | next [-]

It's easy to agree to that, but you're disregarding that the resources you spend on the stronger model could be allocated elsewhere. Conversely, you're assuming that spending more on AI will always yield better results and be worth it, compared to spending the money on other things.

This might actually still hold true now, or or at least many actors in the market behave that way. But I'm not so sure there isn't a cliff to that effect. At some point, if SOTA models remain expensive, it'll turn into a market advantage to figure out how to get things done without depending on the most expensive tooling available.

Similar scenario, different phrasing: if your company relies on overqualified workers to deliver 100% quality, the market may still decide that it's fine to go with 90% quality for 50% the price.

	▲	aurareturn an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		@orwin has claimed that SOTA LLMs have already hit that diminishing return where spending more money on a SOTA LLM today does not add more value than a non-SOTA LLM (assuming high value tasks). I never said there will never be a diminishing return. I'm challenging the statement that we've already hit. Note: We're still scaling chip nodes. It's still worth it for TSMC and chip design companies to invest hundreds of billions into every new chip node every 2-3 years. This is after decades of scaling already.
	▲	4fggfd an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		he clearly has never ran a firm the constraint long-term is vision and vision is really hard - no LLM will help with this.

▲

losteric an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'd guess it depends on the type of business. If it's some genuinely deep technical space, the model would give an edge but even then I think luck would be a significant factor. In a monte carlo of such scenarios, the business with the stronger model might win 6 out of 10 times, but it's no sure thing between the two of us. If we were comparing two businesses building Yet Another Generic CRUD, I would guess it's closer... perhaps even a net-negative to spend money on Fable versus marketing.

▲

abtinf an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Ceteris paribus, all other things are never equal.

	▲	shususjhs 40 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		That’s nonsense and saying “nah-ah” with Latin won’t improve your argument. If we couldn’t isolate a variable we would never be able to argue. Using a better model is an advantage even if only for the coders. There are a million ways to turn that into profit, both proper and not so proper but that’s the beauty of ceteris paribus: the other factors do not matter now.
	▲	4fggfd an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[flagged]

▲

slopinthebag 41 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think the chance of success of the GPT 5.0 startup is higher since they aren’t just gonna be relying on Fable to vibe code some slop saas.

▲

4fggfd an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

haha what a load of crap

that worked as tactic a year ago. not anymore fella.

▲

4fggfd an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Mate the vast majority of firms dont care about this SOTA crap.

They can barely get any efficiency gains beyond the productivity of software engineers. And even that is not really translating into financial performance.