The thing is, for big companies (or even small ones owned by PE, which is MOST of them), it's not just about cost. The big thing is risk.

In my experience as a tech diligence assessor for PE firms for the last 7 years, investors really, really don't like companies being beholded to single entities that they don't control. Anthropic and OpenAI have demonstrated that they are not trustworthy, or predicatable, or finanically safe, or even capable of hitting three fucking nines. Investors know they need companies to be on the AI train, but they really don't like vendor lockin to the big AI companies. Every diligence I get asked "how easily can they change models?"

I think when open models reach 80% or 90% capability (or maybe even less!) a whole lot of companies are going to say "almost as good with way less risk is a better deal".

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MrDresden 4 days ago | parent [-]

How does this compare to being beholden to a single cloud providers like AWS or Google Cloud?

Has there been a sea change in how investors view these things in general, or is it only AI?

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iainctduncan 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Our clients do indeed see multi-cloud as a nice-to-have, but it costs so much more to do, and the big clouds are so trusted, that it's rare that I see it.

On the other hand, nobody trusts the big AI companies not to pull shenanigans or dramatically raise prices... or even be in business in five years.

	▲	spopejoy 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I think openrouter is well on its way to being "big cloud". OpenAI/Anthropic not so much, at least as long as they bet the farm on incremental quality advances.

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ozozozd 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I can’t personally tolerate the AWS/GCP interfaces and clickops.

But in terms of reliability - uptime, product, legal - they are in a different league.

There were exactly 0 instances waking up to a product decision at AWS completely breaking your product or workflows.

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solid_fuel 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Well the big thing that stands out in the reliability front is that AWS and Google cloud are typically stable, certainly more than 3 nines. Meanwhile openai seems to roll dice on every request to see if they’re going to return a 500 or not.