>LLMs drive the cost of making those models down to near zero.

The last place I worked and my current job have a tremendously bureaucratic process for standing up new internally trained models. You could easily spend ten times as much mental energy and effort doing the paperwork and revisiting it annually as you do in the care and feeding of the model itself.

If a canned product meets the requirement, there's a lot to be said for using it. Even if it costs a bit more per decision, the all-in costs are WAY lower.

> The last place I worked and my current job have a tremendously bureaucratic process for standing up new internally trained models

Have you considered putting an LLM on the task of completing the bureaucratic gauntlet

It is often better to use a pretrained model. But the choice here is using a frontier LLM to classify or a purpose built classification algorithm.

I know which I’d expect to perform better.