I grew up in a toxic household (my mom cheated when I was two, my stepfather was very abusive towards my mom, and my mom was always condescending and materialistic and kept using me to get money from my birth father, my birth father has depression and I just never felt any love from him), and I now barely keep in touch with both my parents, the first one hit home.
It remains an unproven hypothesis. The revenue of the top 2-3 labs is still growing nearly exponentially, which is the ultimate piece of data that settles the question empirically for now. Benchmark scores aren't really proof. Benchmaxxing is possible, for example. Only revenue numbers (and gross margins) count.
The ultimate piece is not revenue but profit. At some point these enormous investments will have to be earned back. Good luck with that when open weight models are also continuously improving, have cheap providers and for many are already very usable.
The other point to make is that companies are starting to worry about the risks of externally hosted models.
This is at multiple levels if you have a remote API call as a key part of your workflow/software system.
1. Price risk - might be affordable today - but what about tomorrow?
2. Geopolitical risk - your access might be a victim of geopolitics ( seems much more likely that it used to be ).
3. Model stability/change management - you've got something working at the API get's 'upgraded' and your thing no longer works.
If you are running on open weight models - you are potentially fully in control - ( even if you pay somebody to host - you'd expected there to be multiple hosting options - with the ultimate fallback of being able to host yourself ).
Physical buttons are another reason I absolutely love my 24 4Runner, absolutely huge and clear labeled knobs and buttons all over the place, I feel like being in a cockpit when I drive it.
Hi, I am Jojo Feng, a software engineer with 5 years of professional experience crafting mobile experiences. I started building mobile apps when I was in junior high, it was 2013, back when the Windows Phone was still a thing. I was appealed to the design system of Windows Phone (also because I was not able to afford a MacBook) so I learned C# and XAML after school and started build apps for it. Seeing positive reviews of my apps from users and how they provided values for them motivated me to pursue a career as a mobile engineer, and to this day, I'm still trying my best to bring the best mobile experience to those in need.
